PBS launches a nice Online Playground, and charges toll.

Is it just me, or is PBS, the not-for-profit network/channel, doing an end-around with their new site PBS Kids Play? For $9.95 a month, or $79 a year, your child can go online and play games much like those they buy on discs, with characters that they see on PBS. It looks like a very nice, very well done site, with a progress chart to let parents know that the time they spent ignoring their children was well spent. If I sound a little cynical, it is because the whole article about it in USA Today gave me a bad feeling.

I first read about the site from an RSS feed at 901 AM to USA Today . First of all, I'm not completely ignorant of the laws of economics, I know they have to find some way to pay for it, but aren't they supposed to do that with their endless begging like they do for television? The article says that free membership may be offered to donors. The site is supposed to be ad-free, so there has to be something to support it, but the tone is not one of a not-for-profit organization.

PBS Kids senior vice president Lesli Rotenberg says charging for online programming is "a new direction that is much more convenient for consumers" than packaged media such as CD-ROMs.

"This is an evolution," she says. "It's a new way to do business. And the public has always been very accepting of PBS being able to take profits from the sale of products and put them back into its media." - USA Today

The article goes on quoting the PBS executive, saying that to get this quality content, you are going to have to pay-for-it. I have two problems with that:

• Why? Hasn't the online community found ways around that in every other area? Sure there are premium memberships, but good content is offered all over for free(period).
• Why is PBS jumping up to start taking a profit? Though I realize it is big money and they deserve to get profits for their programming, $9.95 a month is excessive, on a Disney, Pixar or Warner Bros level.

This is a soon-to-be lucrative area. All of the fore-mentioned players are stepping up to the plate, and PBS should be playing the modest, for-the-good-of-the-kids providers. If the rationale is that only well-to-do families will have access to this area.. wake up, every child should have this access, without Mommy and Daddy having a gold card.

Mythbusters - Jamie and Adam, Gods of the Suppressed Science Geek

Go to the street and ask people those job they would most like to do.
Many of them would espouse sports heroes, political icons, super-models, actors and actresses, but if you catch those others to the side, probably steering away from the crowd around the reporter, it would be the hosts of "Mythbusters" .

Adam Savage and Jamie Hyndeman, heading the crew of Mythbusters, have the job many of us only dream about. Not since the rash of Robot-war shows have I envied a bunch of geeks more. Special effects gurus, they use their expertise and the Discovery Channel's apparently growing budget, to blow things up, all in the context of dispelling urban and popular myths. It's frickin' poetic.

The show is equipped with an excellent supporting site, listing out the cast as well as well as summarizing all the covered myths. It is full of video and captures the humor and enthusiasm that saturates the hour-long episodes.

Five years and more than 82 episodes spell out the chord these closet scientists have struck, even sprouting a spin-off/copy-cat show this season called Smashlab. Smashlab , from the promos, seems to focus on one aspect of Mythbusters, one of it's strongest, but may lack the other essentials that have made it's forerunner so appealing, Jamie, Adam, and crew. I'm not exactly the first one on this bus, at least in writing, as any search will prove, for one, this site on blogspot, that gave me the nice picture of Mythbuster crew girl, Kari Byron, with Adam busted ogling her, and Jamie.

Adam is wacky, Jamie is serious, competent, and distant, the crew fills in around them and tackles their own projects. Usually, the blow-em-up stuff is left to Jamie and Adam while segments like "hot-sauce remedies" and are for the crew.

Absolute Poker Scandal Chaps My Ass

I'm casually playing internet poker, not for high stakes, but for some money, usually $1 tournaments or smaller. It's fun, and before I ever jumped thru all the hoops to get real money at stake, I played for more than a year in the free tournament, for imaginary player points or in huge tournaments where the winner got entry into a tournament for real money.

I did okay on the play tables, but it irritated me a little when someone would take a bad beat* and whine that the other player would never have bet that for real money. That is not the whole reason that I began playing for real money, but I can say that yes, people do make completely ignorant bets for real money, as high a stakes as you can get. All I really needed to do to know that was watch people on television. The difference is that they edit out all the in between hands.

Well, that's about all I have to say about online poker, but as usual upon covering a new topic I feel obligated to have an intro. Now, onto what chaps my ass about it, they are busting online cheaters. Now, those same people who bitch and whine about people making bad bets and still beating them also make claims after losing about how the online gaming tables are fixed. There are many claims, using the random card algorithm to know the next card is one I've heard them whine about. The truth is that odds are odds, and 1 in a million is still possible, even in successive hands, get over it.

Then, there is the actual, documented case of one of the founders of Absolute Poker.net for cheating and taking money out of the site through friends.
At least they caught the guy, the link is to a nice write up of how they did it, but let me summarize to my understanding. Somebody had access to an account used for testing the site when it was built, the account had special privileges, it could not actually play in money games, but it could see all the hole cards on the table. Then the cheater took over some unused accounts, from people who'd joined and let their accounts lapse. He used these accounts to win money, apparently on several different tables and specifically in winning a high stakes tournament.

One of the people he beat, a frequent player, requested the hand history of their head to head match-up from AbsolutePoker after the match, and was sent a file that listed not only his hands but all of the hands the player had played that tournament. The hand history of the entire tournament documented someone who HAD to know everyone else's cards. It all lead back to a former employee, but that is covered in the article.

Poker is enjoyable for me with the low risks involved, moreso than I enjoyed playing cribbage, which I did for a couple years, and maybe a little more because of the money. It seems like a little less of a waste of time, and I'm actually(just barely) still in the black as far what I've taken out and what I've put in.

Still, I hate to think that sometimes the whiners at the tables are right.