Shea Stadium Rules 

Well our family Thanksgiving feast is over, and it was a major success.

Everyone got along, though there were a few moments where, in the past, things might have flamed out.

There are two reasons why this year was special.

1. We learned this year how important we are to each other.

2. The advent of Shea Stadium Rules.

Maybe I don't even need to explain them to you.

I think baseball people get this. And mine is a family of baseball people.

Just to be complete.. There's no fighting in Shea Stadium among Mets fans. We may fight with fans of the other guys, but when you cut to the core, a guy wearing a Mets hat is family. There's a deep bond we share. It goes much deeper than words. So while we may disagree, when we're in Shea Stadium, we don't fight.

So, in a family gathering, just invoke the same rules you do inside your team's ballpark.

What else needs to be said other than it works. It really does. Give it a try.

PS: When I explained it to a longtime friend who is a Cubs fan, he understood immediately. Of course he calls them Wrigley Field Rules.

PBS and BBC could boost BitTorrent 

Yesterday the popular Mininova search engine for BitTorrent radically cut back its service.

Previously, they indexed torrents for all programming that was submitted, without concern for who owned the copyright. A Dutch court ruled that they could no longer do that. So now they only index torrents where copyright ownership can be validated. Note the Mininova never stored the content, just links to files that pointed to the content.

Probably some uses of the site were illegal, in some jurisdictions, even though the mainstream media has generally been saying all uses are illegal. For example, consider this BBC article.

I often used Mininova to locate downloads of BBC programming. I've watched excellent dramatic series such as State of Play and documentaries on black holes, Darwin, wars, you name it. I also used Mininova to find PBS shows such as Frontline, Bill Moyers and Nova.

For example, last night I watched an episode of Frontline about credit and debit cards that would be hugely more powerful if everyone who had a credit or debit card would watch. It opened my eyes. An hour totally well spent.

I don't know how the BBC and PBS feel about this. Part of the purpose of this essay is to put the question out there. Since neither network charges directly for programming, is there any reason not to make the programming freely available over BitTorrent?

I've been trying to figure out the best way to ask this question, and decided that making a public appeal to both PBS and BBC was the best approach. Please consider making your content available, with your permission, via BitTorrent.

Fake facts 

You were warned.

http://blog.rsscloud.org/post/259781743/fake-popularity-stats-for-real-time-feeds

Hope you like!