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Taking a quick break from work to blog. Yeah, I know, it is Sunday night. So?
Joi Ito notes Lawrence Lessig gives his opinion of the Supreme Court justices like a sommelier describing a collection of fine wines. "So an underplayed aspect of this campaign has been how the Democratic candidates would differently select the Supreme Court."
Want to see an example of CNN anti-Israeli bias? Check out this headline: Israelis kill Palestinian, another dies in explosion. Read the story to find out the Palestinian in question was lighting a Molotov cocktail, and the explosion was a suicide bomber whose explosives detonated prematurely. Horrible. The bias is so evident, it probably backfires. I hope so.
Reuters reports Iran reformist MPs fight hardline ban on candidates. "Outraged reformers said the bans were bound to draw international fire and vowed to resist the powerful Guardian Council... 2,033 of the 8,200 aspiring candidates had been barred." An unstable situation if ever there was one. Let's hope they don't develop nuclear weapons before the hardliners lose control. [ via John Robb, who comments "Iran begins a political free fall" ]
 Don Hopkins, who works for Maxis (creators of The Sims) reflects on The Sims' appeal. "Maxis designed The Sims in spite of what the focus groups said -- it wouldn't have been interesting nor would it have ever shipped if its design was based on market research." Interesting. My daughters love "simming", as it's known in our house; it is the main computer-based activity for them. When their friends are over, they "sim" together. [ via Dave Winer ]
Dave Winer wonders why more bloggers don't subscribe to the NYTimes feed. That's easy, we don't have to subscribe because he does. Seriously. Bloggers like Dave are excellent filters!
I just tried subscribing to a Google News RSS feed. Absolutely like drinking from a firehose. Everything is there, but sorting the wheat from the chaff is too hard.
CNet hosts a McKinsey study: The Answer to Video Piracy? "Stop me if you've heard this one: A novel form of media distribution is promising to launch lucrative new content services, but the industries involved can't agree on how to protect them from theft or how to split the revenues they generate. At the birth of the cable TV industry, in the 1970s, the story had a happy ending... Fast-forward 30 years and, as a famous baseball player once said, 'It's deja vu all over again.'" Broadband Video-on-demand: opportunity or threat? Both.
 A Slashdot post discusses the world's largest robot, from Tmsuk. "It's 10m wide with its arms fully outstretched, is powered by an onboard water-cooled three cylinder direct injection diesel engine, has a maximum speed of 3Km/h, and carries seven 680,000-pixel CCD cameras with a separate monitor for each camera." Yeah, I want one. Handy for taking out the trash :)
 Check out these excellent reports on the CES conference from Gizmodo: Day 4 report 5 (includes an 80" plasma TV!), The Fakeway (a four-wheeled Segway clone), and Day 4 report 6 (includes Alpine's iPod car adapter).
Looks like Yahoo is adding an RSS aggregator to their My Yahoo service. Doesn't seem controversial or surprising, in fact, why has it taken them so long?
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