The UpStream (Page 478)

You will all recognize that since we started PLuGHiTz Live! Radio and The UpStream, there have been a lot of stories about Australia banning or watering down a videogame. Off the top of my head I can think of Left 4 Dead 2 and Modern Warfare 2, Aliens vs Predator, just to name a few. The reason for the ban is because the ratings board for the country canot classify them under the MA15+ and there is nothing higher.

Shortly after completing the original Portal I spent some time exploring the origins of the game and much of the backstory. Anyone who has ever looked into Valve and their ways knows that there is always content that they don't include in the game, all available for those who are interested. In this case, it had a lot to do with the origins of everyone's favorite robot-powered testing facility.

This morning, Dick Giordano passed away at the age of 77. Mr. Giordano has had a long, distinguished career including time with Marvel, DC, Dell, Valiant and others. In addition to being a talented artist and all-around good guy, Giordano also held Executive-level positions in several art companies.

He spent time as the Executive Editorial Director for DC Comics as well as forming Future Entertainment, a multimedia company, with his creative partners Bob Layton and David Michelinie. He also helped setup two ad-art companies, Continuity Associates and Dik-Art, Inc., which he continued to manage until the end.

While at the helm of DC Comics, he helped to launch such revolutionary concepts as Alan Moore's Watchmen, Frank Miller's Dark Knight Returns. He also spent time working on Batman: Dark Knight of the Roundtable and Batman: Hollywood Knight.

A former colleague of his, former DC President Paul Levitz, had a lot to say about Giordano's career, and said it better than I could, so I will end with this:

This is much less an article and much more giving major kudos to the Internet community yet again!

Web-guy ThiesFX has shown that you don't need millions of dollars to come up with an exceptional advertising campaign. You can just do it for the love of your mobile device!

Verizon Wireless has screwed up the Palm Pre Plus by trying to target soccer moms when true techies are using this device, and Palm has caught major heat because of it, and has since relaunched the campaign for the wireless carrier. Because of that, however, the world forgot all about how cool the Palm Pre commercials were for Sprint. At any rate, this homemade ad kicks the pants off of any paid marketing group's ad that I've seen in the past few years!

So, we got the solution, Palm: Hire this guy. Check it out for yourself!

Hit the break to see the fan-made ad for the Palm WebOS

Earlier this week, the long-running show At the Movies was cancelled due to a number of reasons. In this day in age, we know that any twelve year-old with a laptop can become movie critic with the power of the Internet, and nobody reads reviews in the newspaper or on TV anymore. And although Roger Ebert had no problem accepting that the Internet exists, medical conditions caused him to leave the show in 2006 to be replaced by several different hosts. The good news is that Ebert seems like he's back on his feet and ready to give it another go - at least on the production side - because on his blog the other day he confirmed that he and his wife are collaborating to create a new movie review show. Even better is that he states it will have a strong presence online.

Everyone knows what it's like to wait in long lines at the mall, convenience store or the DMV. Thankfully, researchers from Suncheon National University located in Suncheon, South Korea along with Rice University in Houston Texas have been working hard to make long lines something for the history books. The RFID tags they are developing consist of 3 layers filled with a special semi-conductive ink that contains carbon nano-tubes. This is important because the transistors have to be semi-conducting to store information.

Currently, the tags can only store 1 byte of information but with this proof of concept they can add more transistors to achieve a 96 bit memory capacity which would be enough to store SKUs for all items sold in large grocery stores. The RFID tags cost 3 cents per package to print which is considerably less than silicon tags that are around 50 cents per package. They can also do things that silicon tags can't like store and provide information about product freshness and how long it has been on the shelf. Researchers predict that the cost of their RFIDs if printed directly on the package would fall to 1 cent per package.