What can be learnt from watching Big Brother last night [The Age]?

[...] two men were taken from the house after committing an alleged sexual assault in which a female housemate was pinned down as one of the men rubbed his crotch in her face.

• The amazing way the Big Brother daily show spent half an hour detailing the events, and yet avoided mentioning exactly what happened.
• Only to be interrupted mid show with an advert for the news which managed to describe the "incident" in the words Big Brother couldn't quite spit out, "sexual misconduct".
• How politicians are calling for the show to be axed. Not because it provided an environment that might have helped create such behaviour, not because Big Brother waited a few hours to talk to the housemates about it, but because it dared to televise details of of anything sexual at all.
• How insanely over-thet-op both sides of the "issue" are.
• Don't "quotes" rock?

[ For the sake of / in the tradition of ] preachiness, I'll ignore the fact they obviously didn't discuss the issue openly due to the possibility of a police enquiry...

Maybe it's just me, but maybe this is exactly the sort of thing teenagers should be forced to sit and watch and then have it explained to them why it's wrong. The posts in various forums, including The Age website, are pretty disturbing.

I might suggest the media's and government's obsession with not discussing sex, ever, could cause "incidents" such as this.

Wonder what you're kids are getting up to? This is what they do when they know the cameras are on.

When the only other people willing to talk about sex with you are other kids, this is exactly the sort of thing that "doesn't look like a big deal."

Meanwhile... and don't get me wrong... but wasn't housemate Tim bullied relentlessly for weeks in last years' Big Brother, sometimes fairly violently, but "all in good fun"? Where was the outcry over that? Sure, no-one rubbed a penis in his face...

FreeDB is a database that allows for the automatic identifying of CDs inserted into a computer. Typically it would be used to make ripping CDs and naming the resulting WAV and MP3 files easier.

There is trouble in the FreeDB camp [Slashdot] and it seems it is to shut down.

Interestingly, FreeDB is a free open source version of CDDB. CDDB was a service which started out free, but was later bought by a commercial company that took ownership of the user entered data.

Free services to automatically identify your audio CDs are taken for granted these days. It's difficult to remember a world without them.

I've no doubt if all such services were suddenly lost from the web, fifty more would replace them.

How many free online services do you use and do you expect them to be around in five years time. Have you actually thought about it?

I wrote out a list of all the software installed on my machine a few years ago.

It was a very long list.

How much of it do I actually need.