Splain me something 

I don't know from stuff like this but I was wondering...

Couldn't an mp3 player be made that would simulate chapters if a long enough pause, or maybe a certain tone, was present in the file? You'd have a chapter forward button so you could skip through sections.

iTunes has enhanced podcasts that allow for chapters but there are many things wrong with the whole idea.

Those pretty little sealed boxes are so frustrating. We wait for the manufacturers to decide what features they think will go over with children, then the features get dropped into our laps and we're supposed to say "Thank you for thinking of that, Mr. The Man." We have own ideas, so how about a player that could be programmed? Seems like Dave was anxious at one point a year ago or so to do some programming on the Archos, but I guess he must have decided he wasn't so taken with the hardware after all.

Looking for extra-technology solutions 

You know how I was rambling about how there might be another prong to the attack on splogs and spammers? Get to the purveyors of the tools. What if we also were able to put pressure on some of the companies whose products are sold using scumbag techniques? I'm thinking of the pharmaceuticals, though despite their lofty public faces they're not so squeaky clean themselves. They might not even care, or more likely they would say there's nothing they can do about their distributors.

But -- they might be able to figure out something they could do if every time a million or so people got spam about Cialis they started forwarding the email to any lilly.com account they could find an address for. Hmmm ... taste of their agents', if not their own, medicine?

It seems to me that spam and splogs and SEO abuse are a social problem and trying to thwart them using only weapons of mass technology isn't going to do the whole job.

Stop the revolution, he wants to get off 

Scott Borne wants us to see commercial radio and podcasting as cousins. I don't think radio is any more evil than Scott does. Evil isn't the issue. That's an easy way to dismiss the paradigm shift the podcasting movement seeks to bring about. It's like George Bush saying Islamic terrorists hate freedom -- end of contemplation on that score.

Sure, podcasters can learn something from an 85-year-old industry, as he says. Emulate production tricks and performance tips, maybe, surface-level aspects, but not the system, because it was designed for a different world. Podcasting is a whole different medium in nearly every respect. In a way it's almost only coincidental that both radio and podcasting deliver sound to an audience. I think you miss the beauty of the whole idea of podcasting if you lump it in with a form of communication that speaks to the masses from on high.

More than just hating freedom, but what, exactly? 

Speaking of Islamic terrorists, I haven't been following whatever the Pope had to say. I'll have to catch up.

I'd like to try to understand more about why a big part of the world in the Middle East hates the U.S. I'm coming to think it's more about simply keeping our mitts off the region and less about disapproving of our way of life and culture. I mean, when you learn that Bin Laden likes watching MacGuyver you have to smile and think there might be something there you could work with.

Easiest ever 

Wow! Old news, I know. But, wow, a revelation to me. I just got DSL (Damn Small Linux), burned the image to a CD-ROM and... wow. Easiest way to get Linux going ever. No partitioning the harddrive. You boot from the CD, and it just goes. It's teeny, only 50 MB, so you can even run it from a jump drive.