Amazon have recently begun a service in the United States “selling” downloadable movies. It has been drawing criticism from several sources, including Cory Doctorow.

There are two controversies currently causing apoplexy and distress in Second Life. The lesser controversy concerns so-called mega-prims, which are now available for sale or for free. But should they be?

More than fifty shops have closed in Second Life as a result of the copybot and the fact that “Linden Labs are doing nothing about it”. I found this discussion at Pixel Pinup. I found at least three aspects worrying…

Access appear to be making genuine progress with the next-generation Palm OS, which reminded me that Jeff Hawkins has a secret third business. Or not.

This morning I attempted to put this site online at a GoDaddy address. It all worked perfectly, except for the parts that didn’t.

For about a year and a half Linden Labs have been planning to run Linden Scripting Language on the Mono runtime embedded in Second Life.

In August 2005, Jeff Hawkins, the inventor of the Palm Pilot and the Treo smartphone, claimed that Palm had a “secret third business”. Since then he has single-handedly redefined neuroscience through some personal research that culminated in a book On Information and the founding of a new company Numenta. Now he has given an interview to PalmAddicts, in which he ties these together, and promises a big announcement sometime this year.

Yesterday the recent instability inside Second Life (rule of thumb: anything not crashing will crash in the next two minutes) led me to look around at its possible competitors. I looked at Croquet, a heavy-duty open source 3D platform being written by Alan Kay, among others.

The Slamdance Guerilla Gamermaker festival has withdrawn Super Columbine Massacre! from its 2007 show because, in their words “Slamdance does not have the resources to defend any drawn out civil action that our legal council has stated can easily arise from publicly showing it”.

I looked at the TikiWiki documentation yesterday and realised that I had been right to stay with WikkaWiki! Not that there was anything wrong with TikiWiki. Indeed it looks like a magnificient piece of software.

Having succumbed to an ipod, even though I have huge reservations about the installed DRM, I have begun to look for applications that will help me do the kind of things I feel that I ought to be able to do.