If I built a cool backyard widget and told a few friends, I might be a tad disconcerted when CNN tells a half-million people to check out my house.

Uh... he did put this stuff up on the internet, presumably so people could see it.

Your analogy might work if CNN broke down your fence or peeked in your windows to see your "widget," but you can hardly complain if you built it in your front yard so everyone walking down the street could see it.

I suppose if the submitter got the link from this kid in an e-mail that was just sent around to a few of his friends, you might have a point. But if the submitter found it through a search engine, or through random surfing, well, webmaster emptor

I've always fantasized about a table that would have a small console with a keyboard and screen for each player where there could be messaging between players/GM. I've also wanted to be able to send images/maps and other important information over the consoles on this, my fantasy gaming table.

Of course, cool holograms ala Star Wars Chess Table would rock for the battle map. The problem... I know the technology exists for all of the above, but the cost is far too prohibitive to make a gaming table this cool.

-Steve

The only decent alternative I can see is something similar to what fark.com does. Have a subscriber base that's allowed to see the links a couple hours before they get posted to the main site. This will allow subscribers an advantage when viewing slashdotable sites, and may give them the opportunity to mirror those sites if they feel it might be needed. It will also give the webmaster a warning of what is soon to come and allow them to make whatever changes are needed to prepare for the onslaught. It will also make first-poster's jobs completely useless (unless they want to buy a lot of subscriptions).

Of course, this means that articles might grow stale by a couple hours, but CNN and other sites that will have no problem with the traffic can still be posted normally. Oh well, just an idea.
Happy moderating.

-Restil