Last night, around 11pm, all the major networks announced that Senator Barack Obama had won the election. Soon after, Senator McCain conceded. There were no crazy partisan court hearings, just a simple election. This is your chance to talk about it and what it means for the future of our nation.

zedsville points out an article at Wired proving that plenty of people (at least in Japan) are willing to brave BBS environments without all the fancy layers to screen out spam or online provocateurs: "It's a profile of Hiroyuki Nishimura, the man behind the Japanese site 2channel. Nishimura set up the simplistic BBS in 1999, when he was an exchange student in the USA. The site has no registration or web handles or moderating, no mechanisms to filter out flames and trollish behavior, and no mechanisms to help users find the most insightful comments and topics. But this ugly, lo-res site gets about 500 million pageviews a month. Nishimura doesn't police the contents of posts to his bulletin board, which has resulted in numerous libel claims. 'I used to show up in court,' he says. 'Then one day I overslept, and nothing happened. So I stopped going.' Nishimura has lost about 50 lawsuits and owes millions of dollars in penalties, which he has no intention of paying. 'If the verdict mandates deleting things, I'll do it,' he says. 'I just haven't complied with demands to pay money. Would a cell phone carrier feel responsible when somebody receives a threatening phone call?'"

Michael J. Ross writes "Web 2.0 applications and sites commonly employ a number of technologies: PHP, MySQL, XHTML, CSS, JavaScript/Ajax, microformats (standard formats for HTML data), tags (keywords for categorizing site content), and Web feeds (formatted and streamed Web content, usually in XML, such as an RSS feed). Because learning and using most of these technologies can be rather challenging to a Web developer, perhaps the best way to get started doing so is by using all of them to create a single Web-based application, with no pretense at mastering any one of them. This is the approach taken in Quentin Zervaas's book, Practical Web 2.0 Applications with PHP." Read on for the rest of Michael's review.

Next month's issue of Game Informer has a big, familiar symbol on its cover. On their website, they tease the announcement of a brand-new Ghostbusters video game. This isn't some knock-off, either: "Harold Ramis, Bill Murray and Dan Aykroyd are getting back together and revisiting their roles to make a sequel to Ghostbusters 1 and 2 - in video-game form, and we've got the first details. Both Aykroyd and Ramis are teaming up for scriptwriting duties and are going far beyond just the typical licensed add-your-voice-to-the-game-you-had-nothing-to-do-with formula" Commentary on the announcement provided by Rock, Paper, Shotgun.

theraindog writes "Seagate has announced a 2.5" SCSI hard drive that spins at an astounding 15,000RPM. The Savvio 15K is the first 2.5" hard drive with a 15K-RPM spindle speed, but what's more interesting is that Seagate claims it's the fastest hard drive on the market. Indeed, the drive boasts an impressive 2.9ms seek time, which is more than half a millisecond quicker than that of comparable 3.5" SCSI drives. The Savvio 15K also features perpendicular recording technology and a claimed Mean Time Between Failures of 1.6 million hours."

News.com is running an article on an emotionally-responsive dinosaur robot that the Ugobe company has in the works for 2007. Called 'Pleo', the animatronic Apatosaurus will respond to the vocal intonations of its owners. It won't be able to understand vocal commands; instead, its mood will be dictated by the tone of voice used at it. A terse tone can result in a depressed dino. From the article: "Ugobe will try to go beyond selling a walking/talking toy. The company will publish a developers' kit and open its source code, making the Pleo something of a cousin to the Lego Mindstorms kits or the old Radio Shack 64-in-1 electronics kits. Consumers thus will be able to download 'personality modules' and see how their Pleos react to different stimuli ... Ultimately, the company may license the technology so others can build or incorporate robots into their own products. 'We've created a toolset for making lifelike robots,' Ugobe CEO Bob Christopher said."

doce writes "After chunking my seemingly dead iPod off my balcony while reviewing a rubberized case, the darned thing started working again, though not quite perfectly. After taking it apart, I managed to fix it properly just by reseating the hard drive cable. Could this be the cause of all the click-of-death "sad iPod" failures users are seeing?"

Anonymous Cow writes "This week, the editors of TechEBlog have compiled a list of the 'Top 10 Strangest Gadgets of the Future,' from solar powered LEDs to memory LCD screens, it's all there." Urinal gaming stations! How did no one implement this sooner?