Two seemingly unrelated announcements this week illustrate the intensifying pressure on cable TV’s business model. Comcast (CMCSA) announced this week that it would make more cable-TV programming available free through the Internet by the end of the year but only to people who get broadband and cable service from Comcast.

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No issue brings out America’s talent for self-deception like gambling.

To persuade ourselves that we can keep this particular sin under control, we sequestered casinos in isolated places like Las Vegas and Atlantic City reachable only by superhighways, and isolated them on riverboats where not a single card could be dealt or slot lever pulled until the vessel left the dock.

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After a Chicago student gained national fame for editing a picture of President Obama in the image of the Joker villain from “The Dark Knight” and posting it to Flickr, some of the focus, especially among the tech community, quickly shifted to Flickr for removing the image.

On a site forum, Flickr, a Yahoo (YHOO) property, says it isn’t banning accounts for posting the altered version of a Time magazine cover.

However, the company did receive a notice of infringement under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, or DMCA, which sparked the removal, wrote Heather Champ, Flickr’s director of community.

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The massive cyber attack last week that security experts said was aimed at silencing a single blogger in the country of Georgia instead made him a global celebrity.

Cyxymu, as he is known on his mostly anti-Russia blog, has been the subject of news reports worldwide ever since he was identified as the target of the attack that took down Twitter for several hours and crippled other popular online services.

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In the complex tango between movies and video games, Hollywood may be losing its lead.

Motion picture studios have had a penchant for adapting games into movies all the way back to 1993’s “Super Mario Bros.,” which starred Bob Hoskins as the mustachioed hero Mario and Dennis Hopper as the villainous King Koopa, with varying degrees of success.

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Just what, exactly, are all those Hollywood types getting in return for their investment in Barack Obama’s presidential bid? The Justice Department, a steady ally for the entertainment industry on copyright issues during the Bush administration, today opposed the studios in a potentially precedent-setting dispute with Cablevision over TV recording services.

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Alone in a room in his home in Bonn, Germany, Friedhelm Hillebrand sat at his typewriter, tapping out random sentences and questions on a sheet of paper.

As he went along, Hillebrand counted the number of letters, numbers, punctuation marks and spaces on the page.

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Reporting from San Francisco–Only a few years ago, bigger guns, badder enemies and louder explosives mattered most in videogames.

Now, small is beautiful, and Apple Inc.’s (AAPL) iPhone is largely responsible.

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Last year, Leo Laporte became a Twitter quitter. The host of one of Silicon Valley’s most popular podcasts was none too excited that of all the names in the world, the burgeoning message service had picked one that hit piercingly close to home. The online broadcasting network that Laporte owns and runs a short walk from his house in Petaluma is called TWiT.tv, after his company’s flagship show, “This Week in Tech.”

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During a long career as a television and technology executive, Mitch Berman has tried to sell several different iterations of TV, often in their formative stages. These included premium cable networks (at HBO), original cable programming (E! Entertainment Television), satellite TV (Sky and Foxtel), interactivity (OpenTV), and video on demand (Arris). Now, Berman is onto the next new thing, delivering TV through the Internet. His company, ZillionTV, faces long odds but has at least three advantages over the increasingly crowded field of online TV players: It brings DVD-quality programming straight to the TV set. It has a remote control that sets a new standard for ease of use. And its advertising model actually encourages people to watch commercials, rather than undermining their value to advertisers and programmers. Berman is positioning it as a service that offers unique benefits to consumers, advertisers, content companies and broadband providers. Here’s hoping the Hollywood studios that own a piece of Zillion don’t strangle it in its crib, which they could easily do….

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Updated 4:43 p.m.: @OHHDL is back on Twitter, but it’s now labeled as “the UNOFFICIAL Twitter page of His Holiness the Dalai Lama.”

Some members of Twitter, the microblogging service, received a surprise over the weekend when they were informed that the Dalai Lama, the spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism, had joined the site. “Dalai Lama (OHHDL) is now following your updates on Twitter,” the message read.

They bragged about it to friends, talked about spirituality and cracked jokes (”Can enlightenment be reached 140 char at a time?”). Agence-France Presse even banged out a news story about the Dalai Lama joining Twitter. By Sunday night, he (or is it He?) had attracted 13,000 new followers, an impressive number even for a guy who spiritually represents the whole Tibetan people.

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We’ve finally reached the point at which some of the finest minds doing the biggest thinking about the battered news business believe the best eraser for red ink is… charity.

Although they weren’t the first to make the pitch for newspapers on the dole, financial pros David Swensen, the chief investment officer at Yale, and his colleague Michael Schmidt gave the idea a boost last week in a New York Times op-ed. They posit that the best way to maintain the quality journalism of, say, the New York Times, would be to retool it as a nonprofit and run it from the proceeds of a $5 billion endowment.

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Los Angeles has long been known as a one-industry town–the movies.

Every waiter has a screenplay, every busboy has an agent, and every lawyer is working on a deal. No matter what job you are working at, it is only temporary until that big break happens, when that audition pays off, or when your pilot series is picked up. But what everyone really wants to do is direct.

My friends have teased me about being the only writer in L.A. who has never attempted a screenplay, and I’ve often thought I just may be the only person here with no aspirations to be involved with a movie.

And so it came as no great surprise when two of my closest friends announced their intention to get their German shepherd, Heidi, into show business.

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In an attempt to make headway against rampant film piracy, Warner Bros. will distribute newly released films online in China. The studio struck a deal with Union Voole Technology in China to offer new movies, as well as those that have never been seen in Chinese theaters, at rental prices ranging from 60 cents to $1. The inexpensive video-on-demand service seeks to entice China’s estimated 253 million Internet users to pay for Hollywood fare rather than download illicit copies.

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Nintendo Co.’s sales are speeding along faster than a getaway car, shrugging off economic woes as if they were bugs on the windshield.

Its Wii videogame console continues to be sold out in many stores. Sales of its DS handheld console remain hot despite its being a four-year-old product, ancient by game technology standards.

Sales of the Wii Fit exercise game, launched in May, are on track to surpass those of one of 2008’s bestselling titles, Grand Theft Auto IV, by the end of the year, according to projections by Wedbush Morgan Securities.

All that has driven up the Kyoto, Japan, company’s market value to nearly $45 billion, on par with Walt Disney Co.

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