What if you could help end world hunger and simultaneously increase your vocabulary by simply playing a game?  Now, what if I told you that in order to play that game you didn’t have to buy, pledge, donate, or give away any of your personal information?  Sound too good to be true?  Well, check out FreeRice.com and see what they have to say about all that.  This viral web-based fundraising game developed by John Breen has been able to raise over 1 billion grains of rice (enough rice to feed over 50,000 people for 1 day) by simply having people play a game!  I, for one, have been playing this game for about 30 minutes or so and raised about 2000 grains of rice.  Probably not enough to feed a family but hey, it’s a start.

Sources: BBC News – Web Game Provides Rice for Hungry

I was wandering around the Internet the other day looking for some pertinent information when I came across the Federal Communication Commission’s (FCC) official website. As with most government websites, this site tasted (if websites’ had flavor) like stale Styrofoam with the usual hodgepodge of ill-conceived site schematics and seemingly random design elements. Their site was uninteresting at best, that is until I came across their mascot for their kids section of the site! (Why a kid would be surfing the FCC’s website out of all the possible places on the Internet is anyone’s guess). Anyway, back to the point… The FCC’s mascot for kids, dubbed “Broadband,” was none other than Doraemon – the ever so lovable cat-like robot from the future! Or a shittier, copycat version of it anyway (huh, that’s funny; Word didn’t pick up ‘shittier’ as incorrect).

Now, I don’t want to completely jump the gun here so I will say this: it is possible that the FCC’s mascot just so happens to resemble Doraemon by sheer coincidence. It is also possible that the FCC had obtained the proper rights in order to copy the Doraemon character and therefore have a legitimate license to copy it. And It could also be said that the designer of “Broadband” simple knew of Doraemon and used it as a base to build the FCC’s mascot… oh wait, that’s practically the definition of plagiarism, never mind.

So yeah, basically what I wanted to say was that the FCC plagiarized Doraemon.

Sources:
Doraemon – Wikipedia and myself (used to watch it as a kid)
FCC – Half way down their front page you’ll see a link to their kid’s zone with “Broadband” or you can go and find him there directly.