Happy (belated) Thanksgiving from Gaussian Blur!

• Is virtual rape a crime?
  It was merely a matter of time before “virtual rape” (i.e., a rape in Second Life) became something that people had to deal with. But is a “rape” in a simulated environment truly a crime? This piece from Wired.com declares it a “shitty thing to do” but the author ultimately decides that it isn’t a crime. I find that I generally agree, given the horrific nature of actual real-life rape.
• Newsweek: Review of the Amazon Kindle
  I’ve tried to remain fairly oblivious to the entire e-book phenomenon, but that ended today when my friend and I happened to see the Sony eBook in a New Jersey Borders store. We both thought that the display model was a non-functional fake–the text was just too good on the screen to be real–until he pressed a button and it suddenly changed. Truly, it was a stunning thing to behold, and in that instant I became a believer. So is the Amazon Kindle a groundbreaking piece of technology? Maybe, but probably not. It doesn’t, however, mean that it isn’t interesting… and I still want one. (Warning–annoying auto-playing video with sound on the linked page.)
• The (non-)death of email
  Once again the naysayers are out in full force, saying that email is a dying medium merely because teenagers don’t use it all that much. I think it’s important to point out that teenagers also don’t use corporate intranets that much, nor do they use Blackberrys that much, but neither of those are close to dying. This is a piece from Slate that I find fairly ignorant; American teenagers do not make a representative sample of the Internet, they cannot be relied on as predictors of absorption, and they aren’t even the majority. A bit myopic but important to be aware of nonetheless.
• Zeldman on web design
  What sets web design apart from other forms of design? Internet guru Jeffrey Zeldman likens web design to typography in this compelling piece from A List Apart.