Items I found interesting on August 12th

Things I read today that I found interesting and worthy of comment August 12th:

• Social Media Pillows Are All Kinds of Awesome – Home decor for nerds.
• Special Report: Is US Chief Information Officer (CIO) Vivek Kundra a Phony? (John C Dvorak/Dvorak Uncensored) – Go John! More Obamanation fodder. Guess the mess-sigh-ah likes to surround himself with those of equal experience in their various roles, but then czars never really had to have any qualifications beyond divine right anyway.
• Xbox 360 officially the only console to stream Netflix – sorry, PS3 and Wii (Darren Murph/Engadget) – Interesting. I guess that somehow the browser on the PS3 is somehow prevented from doing the streaming that is available on a PC browser?
• Remakes of Classic Bullfrog Games a Possibility From EA – Populous was the first PC game I ever played. I played it on a friend's PC as I wasn't able to afford such a luxury at the time. I'd love to see this available again on something other than the poorly received DS port.
• Twitter Down: It Was An Attack – Do these attacks not happen to FB, MySpace, Google, Yahoo, etc.? For being all the rage, seems the operations team is either incompetent, seriously under-staffed or under-funded. Could also be the underlying design is seriously flawed in some regard, I guess… back to incompetent then? Yah, I'm on a serious flame-baiting rampage today, not consciously, just happening.
• Capcom Platinum Hits Three-Pack Coming to Xbox 360 – Solid games, but if they didn't fix the controls on Dead Rising, which was a fabulous, but poorly executed game on a controls-level, count me out. Otherwise, a great value if you even have interest in 2 / 3.
• Facebook: No Sponsored Status Updates Allowed – Complete and utter B.S. I'm going to purposely start mentioning brands in my status updates from here on out. Let FB figure out if I'm paid or not. If I mention my company, which clearly pays me, is this a violation? Must be some Obamanation wanna-be's at FB, eh?
• Snow Leopard vs. Windows 7: The War of the Wallpapers (Philip Elmer-DeWitt/Brainstorm Tech) – Yeah, because stock wallpapers are so critical to an OS. Only really points to who is marketing to whom (or is that whom to who? or whom to whom?). Apple markets to the "I'm so much cooler than the masses" crowd while Microsoft is marketing to those masses. Checking the market adoption numbers bears out the obviousness of this example. What would be interesting is to know the average time in each OS that stock wallpapers are used as a user's wallpaper vs. being switched out for something custom by the user.
• Fear and Impatience are Killing the Nabaztag Bunnies – Nuked your passport yet? I'll be doing that as soon as I get my new one.
• The Top 100 Search Terms Queried by Kids – Got kids online? Wondering what they are searching for? Check out this article. Yeah, I know YOUR kid isn't searching on "Sex" or "Porn". Someone with kids want to share why "Fred" is in the top 10?
• Firefox Tips: 5 Ways to Spice Up Your Sidebar – FireFox… Fah, I say! Yep, unnecessarily inflammatory FF hating… Why? Cuz it's fun!
• How To: Backup And Search All Your Friends' Tweets In Google Reader – Actually, yes, I do want my tweets to come to me in RSS as some folks, for example Drudge Report, post to Twitter, but don't provide an RSS feed (yeah, weird). I like the functionality Dave Winer has built, but need an automated "scraping" function that I could setup to automatically generate the OPML and import to my Google Reader for a daily "semi-live" feed.
• Fair-use argument fairly useless against DMCA – Two thoughts:
  1) A pox on both political parties for the hideously general and consequently over-reaching DMCA.
  2) You really want these same morons to control all aspects of your actual, real LIFE with any type of Health Care (i.e. freedom and liberty reducing) "plan"? Seriously, it isn't any more difficult than that.
• Report States U.K. PS3 Stock Clearing for Price Cut – Back-pressure is building as several BluRay items are out that I'd like to acquire, but not enough to drop $400 on a PS3. They drop the price and keep a couple free games in the mix and I'll probably to make this my Christmas present to myself.