This CNN story says video games calm kids before surgery, more effectively than tranquilizers or parental presence. Doctors found that allowing children a few minutes to play the games reduced their anxiety until the anesthesia took effect. Dr. Anu Patel conducted the study after noticing a friend's 7-year-old son was so absorbed with his Game Boy at a restaurant that he ignored the adults and the food at his table.

War of the Worlds teaser trailer is up on Apple's Movie Trailers Web site.

Dr. Fun posted another funny cartoon with Darth Vader as Santa Claus.

The teaser trailer for Charlie and Chocolate Factory is now available. You can watch the streaming QuickTime videos: High Quality (12.7 MB) or Low Quality (3.4 MB).

Rebel sent me a 1 MB funny video (WMV format) of a date as a MasterCard commercial spoof. Be warned, it has sewer talking.

CNET News.com's story asks how big a deal is offshore outsourcing. It depends who you ask:

Research firm Gartner published a study Monday saying "offshore outsourcing isn't as widespread as people think," with lower-cost locales accounting for less than 3 percent of money spent on global information technology services this year.

From a Broadband Reports' security forum thread, John2g reports The Register's article on the death of the mass mailing virus. "Mass mailing viruses will go the way of macro viruses and become much rarer next year. Viruses such as Sober and MyDoom are simply not as effective as they used to be, Kevin Hogan, a Symantec Europe manager, notes. 'People know it's risky to double click on viruses. For virus writers there's no technical kudos. Also mass mailing viruses are noisy, bringing attention to themselves, and that goes against the trend of developing malware that hides its presence on infected systems,' he said."

FiringSquad mentions a CNET News.com article that says Sun Microsystems Chief Executive Scott McNealy showed a photo during a Wednesday speech to illustrate how rapidly technology improves--but instead illustrated another computing phenomenon: how easy it is to fall for an Internet hoax.

Paul Graham, of Wired, explains why why nerds are unpopular. He thinks that most smart kids don't really want to be popular. You can read the rest of his essay/editorial.

Broadband Reports reports that cable executives waxed poetic over "Lite" broadband tiers in 2003; connections from 128kbps to 1Mbps, offered around $25, designed to appeal to stubborn dial-up converts. Most of these tiers never materialized in 2004, primarily because of a fear that existing users, often paying in excess of $40, would downgrade and cost the companies money.

/. posted a ZDNet UK story about how spammers, hackers, and virus writers are all teaming up according to some russian security researchers from Kaspersky Labs. This means that they reckon that weaknesses will be exploited in a matter of hours of being announced, rather than the weeks and months that we're seeing now.

According to TV Tome (12/8/2004 news section), ABC will be reairing all of past episodes Lost to gain new viewers. For those of you who haven't seen the entire series so far, this is your lucky time of year as the show goes on temporary hiatus. Starting December 15th 2004, the show will rerun from the Pilot (in full), and continue down the line until the target date of February 2005. From there, they'll start with Episode 11 called "Whatever The Case May Be" and finish out the season on time in May with however many episodes they decide to finish off the season with. The episodes need to be created and more time is needed for filming.

Pacifist, from a PvP Forum thread, mentions a Steam forum thread on how to make a head crab from Half-Life games.

Purchasing Online discussion, in Broadband Reports' security forum, has good tips on how to shop online securely and avoiding being tricked.

CyberRay reports that Kazaa v3.0 still has spyware even though it says it doesn't. You can read more about this in Broadband Reports' security forum thread.

UserFriendly posted a funny online Flash game called Parking: Battle of the Sexes to see which gender makes a better driver. Male or female? You only need about five minutes to play this game.

Worth1000's theme is on Animal Renaissance 4 that has classic paintings with a little something wild. There are 83 entries with a hybrid of sorts, between our Modern Renaissance contests (where we put modern celebrities into classic art) and our Animal Dressup contests (where we put animals in clothes, just like your little sister does).

The Internet Movie Database reports Disney and Pixar announced Tuesday that they were pushing back the release of their next computer-animated film from November 2005 to June 2006.

New Scientist's article reports that left-handed people may be better equipped for close range mortal combat than those who rely on their right hands, according to researchers.

Netsky-P tops the list of the worst virus outbreaks in 2004--a year marked with nearly a 52 percent increase in new viruses, according to a report released Wednesday by security software maker Sophos.