ASK AMY: ; Lingering Dispute More Than Blowing Smoke
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By Amy Dickinson  Hubby snubbing wife  Your husband thinks you should take his side in a dispute involving the part owner of your tennis club. He wants you to stop playing there. What does Amy say?  A. Give in; quit the club.  B.
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Tycho:  It is often the case that we are jumped by four or five horde ten levels higher than us.  This is often because we've jumped a friend of theirs, ten levels lower than us, as retribution for some earlier act of aggression, in slavish iteration of a behavior that has - as its culmination - the end of all life, everywhere.  Kara marveled that Gabriel and I were able to escape these confrontations with such regularity.  What was our secret?  "Fear," I said, bending the microphone closer.  "Fear, and selfishness."
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Tycho:   The foe revealed, Armadeaddon is now almost complete.  Monday will see the promised epilogue, so at this point you have very nearly survived the ordeal.  We have endeavored these past weeks to reward the true "enthusiast," that man or woman who, brow heavy, has faced such cruel abuse at our hand for the last seven years.  It is apparently our policy to honor such dedication one every decade.    Since it was announced a couple days ago, the revelation that MS would be actively courting the hardcore boardgame player is something I've thought about almost constantly.  It may be that you weren't aware there was such a thing as a hardcore player of boardgames if your last experience with the context was playing Sorry! with your sister when you were eight.  Things have progressed.   There's a million experiences in this space I could use to lure you in, but one company in particular - Days of Wonder has already decided to make electronic variants of their tabletop crack, so they occupy a twilight space between the worlds.  I hope they see an opportunity to take their (already completed!) games over to the 360, or that Microsoft offers them a locked case containing an unspecified amount of untraceable U.S. Currency, because I'd love to see this prescient move by MS turn into a new era.   Days of Wonder makes a game called Shadows Over Camelot that could quickly become a dangerous obsession, obscuring biological realities with a single-minded focus on grails.  Well, grail I guess.  There's just the one.    But it's a completely cooperative boardgame, so every player is working toward the same goals - fighting back invasions, questing, all of it.  Except there might be a traitor in the group, determined by a hidden draw, who tries to derail the effort.  He's not always there, but the potentiality of that nefarious force can create unbelievable social tension.    The gaming table's fixed coordinate in space is its asset and its obstacle - managing space and time is actually the primary challenge of any gaming group, as opposed to banishing necromancers, though that also ranks up there.  Boardgames are so rich in design that, when one of these gets dropped in front of them on Live, I think many gamers will be shocked at their sophistication.    My thumbs hurt.  (CW)TB out.
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The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way. Nobody&#39;s exactly sure why or how the FBI got warrants to take Indymedia&#39;s HDs, but their
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IBM will donate 500 patents for free use. Also:  Yahoo joins Google with hard drive search engine & hellip;.  Inconclusive report on cell phones: Are they a health hazard? & hellip;. and more.
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There's a mini-debate going on about whether podcasting is a success or worth it, or whatever, I'm not sure exactly what the issue is, but it's framed this way --> if you can't get advertisers to hitch a ride on your podcast then podcasting is not worth much if anything.  I'm having a slow Friday so far, it's cloudy and chilly here in the Bay Area, we're in the January doldrums, so I thought maybe I could liven things up a bit by saying both sides of this argument are full of shit wrong. Let me explain. My phone doesn't have a business model. Neither does my porch. I still like having a phone and a porch because they help me meet new people and communicate with people I know. Same with my blog and podcast. Meanwhile... There's another mini-debate about bloggers playing pranks at CES. The Gizmodo guys ran around with some gadgets that turn TV sets off. At CES is this a big deal because much of what goes on there is TV. They were being assholes, interfering with people's ability to do their jobs and make a living. As a result bloggers get a bad rep.  The problem is that they're not bloggers, they're reporters and they work for a company that's not a blog, it's a publication. Publishing stuff on the web with blogging software says nothing about the people and what they write.  A blogger is person who has an idea, expertise or opinion who wants to convey that to other people. The unedited voice of a person. What makes a blogger interesting is that they do something other than writing a blog. If all you do is write a blog, and if you want or need to make money from your blogging, it's really hard to distinguish what you're doing from what professionals who don't use the web (are there any left?) do. Same with podcasting. I do a podcast from time to time because I want to say something. Whether I can run an ad on my podcast means nothing to me because I would never do it. And if I went crazy and let someone put an ad on there, it would only be to reciprocate for them having hosted the podcast, as a way of paying for the podcast itself (I'm contemplating doing exactly that right now so I had to include the disclaimer). I would never burden my podcasting with the task of supporting me. It's not why I podcast. We keep having this argument. Amateurism is good and there's lots of it. Professional writers and broadcasters probably have a place, I don't know, it's not my problem. But let's be clear blogging and podcasting exist independent of a professional's ability to eek out a living using the tools of blogging and podcasting.  Now I'm going to try to get some work done.  See also: Podcasting News, Mashable.
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By Thomas Ginsberg, The Philadelphia Inquirer  Feb. 9--Pleading hasn't worked. Freebies ultimately fail. Outright pressure can backfire.
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Gabe: Sorry for the late comic strip today. It was just a little more than I was able to get done in one day. I ended up having to finish it up this morning. I've had some requests for wallpapers of the relief at the top of the Olympus and I'll try and get something like that out.
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Today's rude question: When does your money manager cost more than the taxman? Answer: Sooner than you think.
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A debate over an anthropologist's book on ancient Hebrew history isn't just academic &#151; it's spilled over into an online dispute between critics trying to keep her from getting tenure and supporters who say the effort stifles scholarly freedom.
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(Linda Stern is a freelance writer. Any opinions in the   column are solely those of Ms. Stern. You can e-mail her at   lindastern@aol.com.)
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The battle of claims and counter-claims over Sen. John Kerry&#39;s service in Vietnam and his later anti-war activism remains at a brisk boil.
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I asked for advice in reducing vitriol on this blog, and a couple of readers helpfully identified a source of the problem: me. They and many others didnât like my suggestion to require commenters to use their real name. Tartuffo wrote: âAs someone who has been on the Internet since 1981, from alt.flame to the [...].
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By Mike Dougherty, Post-Bulletin, Rochester, Minn.  Jun. 22--thingsthatwere.blogspot.com   I love old stuff, and this blog has scads of pix of old stuff that once was. Some of it is still around. Lots of it isn't or is in a serious state of disrepair. Pretty cool stuff. Check it out.
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Valleywag is mostly puff pieces. I guess they're writing about people who, for one reason or another, they don't want to offend. Typical of business press. Don't screw your sources or else they'll dry up. Don't speak ill of Steve Jobs or else no cover picture for you. So, it's reasonable to conclude -- if you read something unbelievably nice about someone in Valleywag, that person is a source. Thing is, they're reduced to attacking about five people. And the flow is miniscule. A pointer from VW is worth about 20 hits. In other words, hire a business reporter to do VW, and you get Infoworld, about 25 years too late.
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By DANA BARTHOLOMEW\\ Staff Writer  Blame the freeze. Blame the record dry spell. Whatever the cause, hills covered with tinder-dry brush could easily go up in smoke unless they see some rain -- soon.
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Do I offend? I must. Why else would immigration restrictionists be trying to pull the plug on commentaries like this one?