In recent years there has been growing concern over media violence and its effects on our society. Various groups have lobbied governments and regulatory bodies, rating systems have been implemented, and thousands of studies have been conducted regarding the possibility of adverse effects, specifically with regards to adolescents or children. This paper argues that there is no evidence supporting a direct causal relationship between violence in the media and aggressive or deviant behavior. While briefly discussing the merits of media regulation, this paper will focus on the effects of video game violence, using the 1999 shootings in Littleton Colorado as a case study.

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On this day 224 years ago, the British General Lord Charles Cornwallis offered his sword in surrender to the French General Rochambeau and General Lafayette, ending the Battle of Yorktown, Virginia. The defeat of the British to the combined French and American forces, coupled with the defeat of the British fleet by French Admiral de Grasse in the Battle of the Chesapeake, was a devastating blow to the British war effort and effectively ended the American Revolutionary War. A century later, the Statue of Liberty, the ubiquitious symbol of American liberty and freedom, was unveiled in New York Harbor on October 28, 1886 as a gift from the Fench to their "sister republic". Grover Cleveland accepted the statue with a speech: "It is a token of the gratitude and appreciation of France, assuring us that in our efforts to commend to the world a government by a free people, we have a steadfast ally, and can demonstrate the kinship of republics. We are not met to bow before a severe and warlike god, but to honor our own peaceful deity".

A century after that, France is the most universally reviled Western country in the United States.

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I live right beside the New Orleans airport.  I am a survivor of Hurricane Katrina.  I keep seeing all these stories and press announcements about how we're receiving tons of aid.  However, this is my story...the story from someone who was there and is still in this horrible situation.

I was a resident of Kenner, which is the suburb where the New Orleans airport is located.

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It was not without some misgivings that I washed my hands one final time, drying them on the pale green cloth specifically reserved for that purpose. I strode over to my shopfront door, turning the old fashioned (but highly useful) Open sign over to Closed. As I slid my blue and white striped apron over my head, I crystallized this vague feeling into a Thought: I had two tickets to see the latest blockbuster The Island tonight, and I was afraid it didn't look like a very good film at all.

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If you spend much time in the game development industry, you start to see patterns. I was browsing around the David Perry designer forums, and came across quite a few interesting people bursting with designs. One particular one caught my eye, though. It sounded interesting. It sounded exciting. It sounded like an epic so grand it would put Cleopatra to shame. And it sounded utterly, utterly impossible to make. I won't single out the budding designer here for ridicule, but he had created a story so grand, a world so rich, that it would take a team of thousands several years to create. He, of course, had only himself, and no idea what to do to start.

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by Michael Leza

When most people watch a TV show, like Buffy or CSI or Survivor, they are well aware of the fact that everything they see is preplanned, scripted, and fully controlled. Days of planning, hard work, and post production have gone into that show to turn it from a jumble of video recordings into a coherent show.

What many of these same people are not aware of (and how could they be?) is that when they sit down to watch the nightly news, or their favorite artificial news-flavored product, they are in fact watching a show that has been just as managed, planned, and scripted as any episode of Seinfeld was.

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The RIAA and many other local facsimiles in nations outside the USA are aggressively persuing file sharers. More and more files on the file sharing services available are fakes; they do not contain what they portend to be, or contain only 5 to 7 seconds on a loop. Leechers reduce the average download speed considerably. Some manage to circumvent most of these problems but do not offer satisfactory search.

In short, there are plenty of reasons why it's time to introduce Yet Another File Sharing Service. This time, let's do it right.

Read on for a detailed description of how solve all the problems that current file sharing systems are struggling with.

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This is a review of Chris Willis and Shayne Bowman's great online book 'We Media.' An earlier version was published here. In this piece, I use the terms participatory journalism, grassroots journalism, citizens journalism to all describe basically the same thing - journalism as conversation, or what Dan Gillmor has called the read-write web.

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What is Amazon up to these days? Are they the friend or foe of the independent writer?

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Six years ago during a daytime talk show interview with Patrick Stewart, Regis Philbin said: "I never really understood Star Trek. What are they doing up there?" To which Stewart replied, "boldly going where no one has gone before." The audience cheered, but the question remains unanswered to this day and none of the-powers-that-be are asking this question.

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