[wp-hackers] Allowing future posts

[Hacker Scot]

I'm looking for a way to have future-dated posts go live immediately  
rather than waiting for their timestamp to arrive.  IOTW I want posts  
to go live when I hit Publish  even if the timestamp is for two months  
from now (this is for an Events-like publishing system, but I don’t  
want to use an Events plugin for reasons I won’t go into).

  I found that if I change the post_status in wp_posts from “future”  
to “publish” then a future-dated post goes live. Good. So I need to  
write a plugin that does one of:

1) When a post is submitted, don’t mark it “future” even if it is in  
the future, or
2) When displaying the loop, don’t filter out “future” posts.

Which approach makes more sense / would be easier to write? Or is  
there another way to accomplish this that I'm not finding?

Thanks,
Scot