highways writes "It's rare that that a copyright case is heard in the Australian High Court, let alone a case heard by all seven sitting judges. At stake is a small company IceTV (which we discussed when it launched four years back) taking on Australia's largest television station, the Nine Network, over the copyright status of the weekly broadcast schedule. That is, the schedule itself, not any synopsis or description of the individual programs. Users of PVRs such as MythTV will be well aware of the hassle it is the get a reliable program schedule stream to use for recordings. The saga has gone on for more than two years with Nine unsuccessfully suing IceTV, but later winning on appeal. At issue is whether a list of facts like an electronic program guide is a 'compilation' protected under Australian copyright law. This has implications for the copyright status of many publicly available databases and the limits to which the information can be distributed."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

highways writes "It's rare that that a copyright case is heard in the Australian High Court, let alone a case heard by all seven sitting judges. At stake is a small company IceTV (which we discussed when it launched four years back) taking on Australia's largest television station, the Nine Network, over the copyright status of the weekly broadcast schedule. That is, the schedule itself, not any synopsis or description of the individual programs. Users of PVRs such as MythTV will be well aware of the hassle it is the get a reliable program schedule stream to use for recordings. The saga has gone on for more than two years with Nine unsuccessfully suing IceTV, but later winning on appeal. At issue is whether a list of facts like an electronic program guide is a 'compilation' protected under Australian copyright law. This has implications for the copyright status of many publicly available databases and the limits to which the information can be distributed."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Alexander and Ivan shared their awesome projects with fair-goers in the Austin Children's Museum tent. Ivan (age 7) is here with his Mega Model; Alexander (age 9) has been building paper ships since he was 6 years old.

See more pictures of kids (and grownups) at Maker Faire on Flickr!

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Steve Gillmor has been saying that Twitter doesn't have track for quite some time, and for some of that time he was correct, but it's been bothering me for a while because I don't think he's correct now. Hopefully I won't look too stupid if I don't understand all the subleties of tracking Twitter topics.

Enough caveats? I hope so.

Anyway...

Suppose I want to track all conversations about Obama on Twitter?

1. Go to the search page.

2. Enter "Obama" (leave out the quotes).

3. Click on Search.

4. Wait.

5. A few seconds later it will say something like this: "58 more results since you started searching. Refresh to see them." When you refresh, sure enough there are the 58 results. (Those were the ones that appeared while I was writing this blog post.)

Now maybe that's not what Track does, if so I'm stupid.

thefickler writes "Four out of the five Al-Qaeda online forums have disappeared. The terrorist group used these forums to relay messages to its supporters. The four that have gone missing seem to have taken a hit back on September 10, the day before the annual video marking the 9/11 attacks was due to be disseminated. No one knows who is responsible for the sites' disappearance."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Imho, asking how Twitter will make money is not a dumb question. It's not a sporting thing, not idle conversation. I don't think people are saying Twitter won't find a way to make money, rather expecting that how they make money will change the way Twitter works, probably not an improvement.

The investors in Twitter, I think, like most tech investors, lack the perspective of a user. Here's the key point, we feel like we're investors too. We're putting our time into developing the service, when people sign up to Twitter because I urge them to, or stay there because I pour my time into it, I wonder where that investment will go when the people who control the service (you, Bijan, Ev, Jack, Biz, et al) change it so they can make money.

There's an uneasy feeling that when we see how it works, we aren't going to like it.

That's why the question keeps coming up, imho.

I have a preference. I'd like to be able to pay Twitter a monthly fee to opt out of however they decide to commercialize it. I think that's the honorable way to transition from a free approach (the current one) to a money-making approach.

Ant writes "The Telegraph reports that people over 55 who were brought up watching a monochrome TV set are more likely to dream in black and white, even years later. New research suggests that the type of television you watched as a child has a profound effect on the color of your dreams. While almost all under-25s dream in color, many over-55s, all of whom were brought up with B&W sets, often still dream in monochrome. The study, out ot Dundee University, used a small number of subjects under 25 or over 55 and the results suggest that '... there could be a critical period in our childhood when watching films has a big impact on the way dreams are formed... [B]efore the advent of black and white television all the evidence suggests we were dreaming in color.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Mirthful story in the November 2008 issue of The Atlantic.

Airport security in America is a sham—“security theater” designed to make travelers feel better and catch stupid terrorists. Smart ones can get through security with fake boarding passes and all manner of prohibited items —- as our correspondent did with ease.

As we stood at an airport Starbucks, [Bruce] Schnei­er spread before me a batch of fabricated boarding passes for Northwest Airlines flight 1714, scheduled to depart at 2:20 p.m. and arrive at Reagan National at 5:47 p.m. He had taken the liberty of upgrading us to first class, and had even granted me “Platinum/Elite Plus” status, which was gracious of him. This status would allow us to skip the ranks of hoi-polloi flyers and join the expedited line, which is my preference, because those knotty, teeming security lines are the most dangerous places in airports: terrorists could paralyze U.S. aviation merely by detonating a bomb at any security checkpoint, all of which are, of course, entirely unsecured. (I once asked Michael Chertoff, the secretary of Homeland Security, about this. “We actually ultimately do have a vision of trying to move the security checkpoint away from the gate, deeper into the airport itself, but there’s always going to be some place that people congregate. So if you’re asking me, is there any way to protect against a person taking a bomb into a crowded location and blowing it up, the answer is no.”)

... Schnei­er and I joined the line with our ersatz boarding passes. “Technically we could get arrested for this,” he said, but we judged the risk to be acceptable. We handed our boarding passes and IDs to the security officer, who inspected our driver’s licenses through a loupe, one of those magnifying-glass devices jewelers use for minute examinations of fine detail. This was the moment of maximum peril, not because the boarding passes were flawed, but because the TSA now trains its officers in the science of behavior detection. The SPOT program—“Screening of Passengers by Observation Techniques”—was based in part on the work of a psychologist who believes that involuntary facial-muscle movements, including the most fleeting “micro-expressions,” can betray lying or criminality. The training program for behavior-detection officers is one week long. Our facial muscles did not cooperate with the SPOT program, apparently, because the officer chicken-scratched onto our boarding passes what might have been his signature, or the number 4, or the letter y. We took our shoes off and placed our laptops in bins. Schnei­er took from his bag a 12-ounce container labeled “saline solution.”

“It’s allowed,” he said. Medical supplies, such as saline solution for contact-lens cleaning, don’t fall under the TSA’s three-ounce rule.

“What’s allowed?” I asked. “Saline solution, or bottles labeled saline solution?”

“Bottles labeled saline solution. They won’t check what’s in it, trust me.”

They did not check.

The Things He Carried -- The Atlantic (November 2008)

deuist writes "Several years ago I wrote a book called The Not So Short Introduction to Getting Into Medical School (PDF) and released it online under a Creative Commons license. I have been asked several times to publish the text so that I can make money off of it. The book has become quite famous among pre-med students and is now available from the Princeton Review as a free CD that is given to pre-medical interest groups. My question to the Slashdot community involves claiming this work as volunteering for tax purposes. Have any of you had any success with releasing free software and then writing off your time when April 15 rolls around?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

No Halloween party or Haunted House can be complete without at least one great looking CSI inspired corpse lying around. Check out what this MAKER did with some free time, a skeleton and carpet latex. Make sure you scroll all the way down as it looks a lot better in the 2.0 version. Here's what he used the carpet latex for:

Well, first you cover a section of the skeleton with some carpet latex. Stretch some cotton across the section you want to bulk up, and then cover it with more carpet latex. The cotton will naturally tend to stretch out in strings, which just adds to the decaying effect. The cotton I'm actually using is "Sterile Absorbent Cotton" ... a continuous roll of cotton about 6 inches wide. This stuff is GREAT for corpsing!

And while you are corpsing make sure you enter our MAKE Halloween Contest 2008!

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UnknowingFool writes "Farley Katz, who draws for New Yorker magazine, ran into xkcd.com's Randall Munroe in a grocery store. He challenged Munroe to a cartoon-off — each cartoonist to produce drawings about the Internet as envisioned by the elderly, String Theory, 1999, and one's favorite animal eating one's favorite food. In the ensuing short interview, Munroe describes XKCD as 'a webcomic about stick figures who do math, play with staple guns, mess around on the Internet, and have lots of sex. It's about three-fourths autobiographical.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This "Noriko-San" sleep mask was developed for "drowsy train commuters" afraid of sleeping past their stop and consists of a scrolling LED display that communicates the wearer's destination to other passengers in the train. Of course, this relies on other people actually caring enough to wake you up in time, which its developer, Pyocotan, found not to be the case when other passengers felt more uncomfortable with the mask than helpful. Not to be outdone, he believes that if the mask is widespread enough, that it may eventually gain more acceptance from people. The cost of the mask was around $200 USD to develop so it would probably have to come down in price as well.

via Pink Tentacle

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arcticstoat writes "It's sometimes easy to forget that the PC graphics market isn't owned by ATI and Nvidia, and the company that first gave us 3D acceleration, S3, is very much still around. So much so, in fact, that it's now even developed its own GPGPU technology. S3 claims that its Chrome 400 chips can accelerate gaming physics, HD video transcoding/encoding and photo enhancement. To demonstrate the latter, S3 has released a free download called S3FotoPro, which enhances color clarity and reduces haze in photos. However, the company hasn't yet revealed whether it plans to support OpenCL in the future." The Tech Report also points out that this could allow S3's parent company, VIA, to compete with Intel and AMD in graphics processing technology.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I went to see the 4:05PM showing of W at the California Theater on Kitteridge in Berkeley, and well, it was a nice movie, but I never really got into the plot. It could be I know too much about the actual story, like having read the book before seeing the movie.

It is sympathetic to both Bush presidents, who were the main characters. Like the other Oliver Stone movie about a President, you're left wondering what would have been different if the son felt loved by his father (with Nixon it was bigger, we were asked to wonder what if anyone had loved him).



You can't help but get a big crush on Laura Bush, the Democrat librarian who (according to the movie) really does love Dubya (she calls him Bushie).

The White House fools are like cartoon characters. You'll laugh out loud at the portrayals of Rumsfeld, Rice, Rove, Cheney, but they all came off as weakly played arch enemies of Batman or Superman. Or a SNL parody.

I was hoping for a great Oliver Stone movie. Any Given Sunday is one of my all-time favorites, but this one never draws you into anything like a plot, there's zero suspension of disbelief. It was interesting as a spectacle, nothing more.

With Guitar Hero: World Tour set to launch on October 26th, Activision has released a list of downloadable content that will be immediately available. Activision has also apparently included a trailer for Guitar Hero: Metallica (which will arrive sometime next year), and they recently trademarked the name 'Guitar Hero Modern Hits,' which may be part of their plan to increase the amount of Guitar Hero content they produce. Meanwhile, new Rock Band 2 DLC tracks are coming as well, and the release dates for the PS2, PS3, and Wii versions have been set. Early reports say the Wii version made the platform jump better than the original Rock Band, and that all currently existing DLC will be available for Rock Band 2. MTV's Multiplayer blog took a look at Wii Music, which creator Shigeru Miyamoto calls, "Not quite a game and not quite an instrument."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

lbwbl writes with news that a New Jersey man will plead guilty to one felony count of 'unauthorized impairment of a protected computer' for his distributed denial of service attacks on Scientology websites as part of 'Anonymous' earlier this year. From Wired: "He faces a likely sentence of 12 to 18 months in prison based on stipulations in his plea agreement, which also obliges him to pay $37,500 in restitution. ... Friday's case, in US District Court in Los Angeles, marks the first prosecution of an Anonymous member for a series of attacks against the Church of Scientology that began in mid-January. The secretive religious group strayed into Anonymous' sights after trying to suppress the publication of a creepy Tom Cruise video produced for Scientology members."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I remember when Archie's was a tiny shop selling surplus weirdness. They have a lot of their own products now, but you can still find the odd raw materials for your own strange creations. If you ever get a chance to visit the store in Seattle, it's stuffed full of weird wonderful stuff. Their online site is here.

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An anonymous reader writes "The hedge fund investor who prided himself on achieving 1000% returns, Andrew Lahde, wrote a goodbye letter to mark his departure from the financial world. In it, he suggests people think about building a new government model, and his suggestion is to have someone like George Soros fund a new government that brings together the best and brightest minds in a manner where they're not tempted by bribery. In doing so, he refers to how Linux grows and competes with Microsoft. An open source government. How would such a system work, and could it succeed? How long before it became corrupt? Would it need a benevolent dictator (Linus vs. Soros)?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

ThinSkin writes "Just when you thought laser and optical mice were enjoying their reign on mousepads worldwide, Microsoft has to come along and introduces their 'BlueTrack Technology,' a mouse tracking system that aims to work on virtually any terrain short of mirrored and reflective surfaces. ExtremeTech reviews the Explorer Mouse and Explorer Mini Mouse, both of which are powered by Microsoft's newest sensor, to see just how well this technology works. Testing on granite, carpet, marble, and other surfaces, the reviewers were impressed with the responsiveness of BlueTrack, but they also noted that laser mice were competitive on these surfaces as well. Even though the mice didn't get a recommendation from the reviewers (price being a major concern), they did admit that this BlueTrack is the best tracking system available today. MaximumPC has some pictures and a brief technical interview."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

snydeq writes "Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister calls for generic VMs divorced from the syntactic details of specific languages in order to provide developers with some much-needed flexibility in the years ahead: 'Imagine being able to program in the language of your choice and then choose from any of several different underlying engines to execute your code, depending upon the needs of your application.' This 'next major stage in the evolution of programming' is already under way, he writes, citing Jim Hugunin's work with Python on the CLR, Microsoft's forthcoming Dynamic Language Runtime, Jython, Sun's Da Vinci Machine, and the long-delayed Perl/Python Parrot. And with modern JITs capable of outputting machine code almost as efficient as hand-coded C, the idea of running code through a truly generic VM may be yet another key factor that will shape the future of scripting."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ars Technica reports on research out of Cal Tech where scientists were able to create logic gates out of RNA molecules. Thus far, they've demonstrated AND gates and OR gates, with work proceeding on more complicated systems. The work shows promise for ability to easily detect the presence of particular chemicals. The abstract from the scientists' paper is available at Science. Quoting Ars: "Detecting tetracycline isn't especially interesting, but RNA that binds to specific small molecules is actually relatively easy to make; repeated rounds of amplification and selection for binding can evolve these RNAs in a couple of days. This means that, in a matter of days, researchers can grow yeast colonies that glow in response to a variety of chemicals, or even to combinations of chemicals. More complicated circuits should be possible if the ribozymes are inserted into messenger RNAs that encode transcription factors, which could, in turn, regulate genes that encode yet other ribozymes."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

nk497 writes "The Metadata Analysis and Mining Application (MAMA) doesn't index content like a standard search engine, but looks at markup, style, scripting and the technology behind pages. Based on those existing MAMA-ed pages, 80.4 per cent of sites use cascading style sheets (CSS), while the average web page has 47 markup errors and 16,400 characters. Should you want to know which country is using the AJAX component XMLHttpRequest the most, MAMA can tell you that it's Norway, with 10.2 per cent of the data set." Additional coverage is available at Computerworld, and a deeper explanation is up at Opera's Dev site.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

(Image: Jan Cobb)

Meet our new guest blogger, John Hodgman. Here is a brief introduction:

Before he went on television, John Hodgman was a simple writer, expert, and Former Professional Literary Agent living in New York City. In this capacity, he has served as the Humor Editor for the New York Times Magazine, Occasional Public Radio Personality for This American Life, Advice Columnist for McSweeney’s, and a Freelance Journalist specializing in Food, Non-Wine Alcohol, Battlestar Galactica, and most other subjects. This was enough of a career for any human. But then he wrote a book of COMPLETE WORLD KNOWLEDGE entitled Areas of My Expertise and was asked to appear on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, where he continues to provide commentary as the show’s Resident Expert. Now, at 37, he has unexpectedly become a Famous Minor Television Personality, appearing as the “PC” in a series of television ads for Apple brand computers, and accepting guest roles as “the person wearing glasses” in a variety of films and TV shows, including Battlestar Galactica, a show he once wrote about as a journalist. From time to time, he is asked to describe his professional life, and in particular, the effect of this dramatic and surprising change of fortune, and typically, he finds he cannot do it.

His new book, More Information Than You Require, just came out today.

Photo by Whole Wheat Toast. (Thanks Tara McGinley! Via Neatorama)

coondoggie writes "Nine rocket-powered vehicles will compete for NASA's $2 million, 2008 Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge, Oct. 24-25. The goal is to accelerate development of commercial Lunar Landers capable of bringing payloads or humans back and forth between lunar orbit and the lunar surface. NASA of course would expect to use some of the technology developed at the Challenge. To win the prize, teams must demonstrate a rocket-propelled vehicle and payload that takes off vertically, climbs to a defined altitude, flies for a pre-determined amount of time, and then land vertically on a target that is a fixed distance from the launch pad. After landing, the vehicle must take off again within a pre-determined time, fly for a certain amount of time and then land back on its original launch pad." Details about the teams involved with the competition are available at the X-Prize website. The event will be broadcast live via webcast next weekend.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

If you're in San Francisco on Oct 29, be sure to check out the free launch-party for Larry Lessig's new book, Remix:

Oct 29 2008 - 6:30pm

Join us as we celebrate the Release of Professor Larry Lessig's new Book!

Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy

Reception 6:30pm
Program 7:00pm

Free and open to the public!

W Hotel
181 Third Street
San Francisco, CA
United States

10/29: Lessig Book Release Party (Thanks, Lauren!)

We just covered Larry Lessig's recent opinion piece about how to save remix culture (which, tragically, was entitled "a defense of piracy" -- which it's not). However, that was just a teaser from his new book, REMIX, which has now been released. And, of course, true to form, Lessig will soon release a copy of the book online for remixing purposes. And, as Mathew Ingram tells us, today an "open source documentary about copyright and culture" called RiP: A Remix Manifesto is premiering as well. That movie was made, in part, with the help of many people working on making it better. Here's the trailer: The movie apparently focuses on Gregg Gillis, better known as Girl Talk, the remix artist we've discussed in the past plenty of times. It certainly looks like the book and the documentary will go together well (Lessig appears in the film), and hopefully will get people realizing that creativity has always involved standing on the shoulders of giants, and being able to improve on the works of those who came before you -- and with draconian copyright laws, we're often stamping out that possibility.

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I've especially enjoyed sharing some of my enthusiasms for obscure musical acts here on Boing Boing as the guest blogger. This post is about PJ Proby, crazed crooner and rock and roll hellion. I am a massive, massive fan of this guy's music. I've been fascinated by him for years and would LOVE to make a documentary about him. No one plays the sad, apologetic lonely guy better than PJ Proby. His voice can make a grown man cry, but you'd almost have to be half-mad to sell a song like he can. And half-mad PJ Proby probably is...

Once famously blacklisted in the UK for repeated splitting his blue velvet trousers onstage, it's tempting to call PJ Proby the "Zelig of rock and roll." Despite the fact that today almost no one remembers who the guy is/was, he was a peer and fellow performer of The Beatles, Tom Jones, Cilla Black, The Rolling Stones, Jackie DeShannon, Marc Almond, St. Etienne and many others. His sister dated Elvis Presley and Proby himself sang the "vocal guides" imitating Elvis that the King would then re-record during his Hollywood movie phase. His first British TV appearance was as a special guest on "Around the Beatles."

His 1968 album "Three Week Hero" featured none other than a young Led Zeppelin (or the "New Yardbirds" as they were then known) warming up as his backing band and he appeared as "The Godfather" touring with The Who during their 1997 "Quadrophenia" production. Van Morrison even wrote a song called "Whatever Happened to PJ Proby?" I could go on and on, he's led a very colorful, albeit very self-destructive life, but I'll leave the bio for the links and concentrate on all the great PJ Proby performances you can find on YouTube after the jump (and trust me, this isn't the best stuff that's out there).

"You Can't Come Home Again (If You Leave Me Now) | "Around The Beatles" (1964) | "Hold Me" (first UK hit single) | "That Means A Lot" (Lennon-McCartney composition) | "Somewhere" | ""What's Wrong With My World?" | PJ Proby/Marc Almond duet "Yesterday Has Gone" (1996) | Interesting Marc Almond interview on the difficulties of working with PJ Proby | "Niki Hoeky" (audio only) (Can someone out there please post a video of this?) | Official PJ Proby site | Get Hip to His Conflagration | The Fall and Rise of PJ Proby | How P.J. Proby's life is falling apart at the seams (Recent article about the 69-year-old singer's legal troubles) | St. Etienne's Bob Stanley on the Pop Mavericks

Earlier this year, at the Mesh Conference in Toronto, I had the pleasure of meeting Nancy Baym, a professor of communications at the University of Kansas. She's been doing tremendous research into questions concerning online "fan" communities around musicians. She's just posted her latest paper, with Robert Burnett from Karlstad University in Sweden, examining the question of whether or not Web 2.0 "fan communities" are really about exploitation or empowerment. This is a question we've addressed before, given that web 2.0 critics, such as Nicholas Carr, like to ignore that there are non-monetary benefits in the economy, and thus assume that any activity done for reasons other than money are exploitation.

The paper takes a balanced look at the Swedish independent music scene, which relies heavily on fan communities to act as filters and promoters of the music. The record labels don't focus so much on "selling music" so much as building up attention that can then be monetized in many different ways. Thus, they encourage fans to share and promote their music for them. So, is this use of fans exploitation?

The paper shows that, contrary to the "exploitation" view, the fans often get plenty of value out of the whole process, if not directly in monetary terms. As the paper notes, the concept of "exploitation" suggests a cost to the participant, but if they get more out of participating than they give up, then it hardly seems like exploitation. Instead, it's a reasonable choice in a non-monetary market, where they get more value than they put in. Plus, the paper notes that some of the fan participants eventually do make some money out of their efforts as well. That shouldn't come as much of a surprise. There are plenty of folks who became highly involved in a hobby and are eventually able to turn that into a business.

But the bigger issue for many fans, is simply being able to build relationships with the musicians they love -- and with other fans. To them, that's worth a lot more than money, and it's hard to see how building strong relationships and friendships can be seen as exploitation.

On top of that, the paper notes that the fans also make use of certain strategies to make sure -- implicitly or explicitly -- that they're not being exploited. In other words, whether they realize it or not, they're aware at some level of the possibility of being exploited by the situation, and they make certain choices to protect against that possibility. Overall, a very interesting paper that's worth reading, and I look forward to more research on this topic.

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From now until the awesomeness that is Maker Faire Austin, I'll be highlighting projects that you can find at Travis County Fairgrounds on 10/18-19. Tickets here; see you there!

Shopbot will be out in full force this weekend, including a complete DIY house project:

The New Orleans House Project is prefabricated housing that can be assembled without any hardware using only a rubber mallet in a very short time by unskilled labor. The goal of this project is to provide quick, easy, temporary housing for areas effected by a natural disaster.

Bat Houses: provide a safe nesting area for bats. This helps keep bats out of your attic. There will be a Bat Expert coming from Georgia, with some live bats.

Kids projects 3D glowing skulls, and rubber band racers.

I almost want to get in a suspended animation machine until tomorrow...

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From now until the awesomeness that is Maker Faire Austin, I'll be highlighting projects that you can find at Travis County Fairgrounds on 10/18-19. Tickets here; see you there!

Shopbot will be out in full force this weekend, including a complete DIY house project:

The New Orleans House Project is prefabricated housing that can be assembled without any hardware using only a rubber mallet in a very short time by unskilled labor. The goal of this project is to provide quick, easy, temporary housing for areas effected by a natural disaster.

Bat Houses: provide a safe nesting area for bats. This helps keep bats out of your attic. There will be a Bat Expert coming from Georgia, with some live bats.

Kids projects 3D glowing skulls, and rubber band racers.

I almost want to get in a suspended animation machine until tomorrow...

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Maker Faire | Digg this!

twitter points out coverage of a discussion between Steve Ballmer and two Gartner analysts in which the Microsoft CEO admits that Google Apps is enjoying an advantage over Office by users who want to share their documents. He points to Office Live as their response to Google, and adds, "Google has the lead, but, if we're good at advertising, we'll compete with them in the consumer business." Whether or not they're good at advertising is still in question, if their recent attempts are any indication. Ballmer also made statements indicating some sort of arrangement with Yahoo! could still be in the works, but Microsoft was quick to step on that idea. Regarding Windows Vista, he said Microsoft was prepared for people to skip it altogether, and that Microsoft would be "ready" when it was time to deploy Windows 7.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

twitter points out coverage of a discussion between Steve Ballmer and two Gartner analysts in which the Microsoft CEO admits that Google Apps is enjoying an advantage over Office by users who want to share their documents. He points to Office Live as their response to Google, and adds, "Google has the lead, but, if we're good at advertising, we'll compete with them in the consumer business." Whether or not they're good at advertising is still in question, if their recent attempts are any indication. Ballmer also made statements indicating some sort of arrangement with Yahoo! could still be in the works, but Microsoft was quick to step on that idea. Regarding Windows Vista, he said Microsoft was prepared for people to skip it altogether, and that Microsoft would be "ready" when it was time to deploy Windows 7.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Michael Moore made some news by releasing his latest movie for free online, but some brushed aside that idea, since Moore is an activist and his message is more important than the business side of things. But it appears that other popular filmmakers are diving into free internet distribution as well. Wayne Wang, who has directed such well known movies as The Joy Luck Club, Smoke and Maid in Manhattan is releasing his entire latest feature-length film online for free. It's not downloadable, but the entire movie is available at YouTube and embeddable. So grab some popcorn and watch it here:

Admittedly, this was an independent production done quickly on something of a whim, and Wang was worried about being able to get it going through normal distribution channels -- but it's yet another experiment to watch, as more movie makers realize that there's more to making successful, money-making movies than getting people to pay for every single viewing.

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Michael Moore made some news by releasing his latest movie for free online, but some brushed aside that idea, since Moore is an activist and his message is more important than the business side of things. But it appears that other popular filmmakers are diving into free internet distribution as well. Wayne Wang, who has directed such well known movies as The Joy Luck Club, Smoke and Maid in Manhattan is releasing his entire latest feature-length film online for free. It's not downloadable, but the entire movie is available at YouTube and embeddable. So grab some popcorn and watch it here:

Admittedly, this was an independent production done quickly on something of a whim, and Wang was worried about being able to get it going through normal distribution channels -- but it's yet another experiment to watch, as more movie makers realize that there's more to making successful, money-making movies than getting people to pay for every single viewing.

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Salim sez, "William Poole, an 18-year-old Kentucky high-school student wrote a story about a high-school over-ran by a plague of zombies. Not exactly the most original scenario, but just the sort of thing for a young writer to cut his teeth on. Unfortunately the kid's grandparents found the manuscript and assumed the very worst. The high-schooler was arrested on Tuesday morning and is currently being held at the Clark County Detention Center. The local police seem to be treating this work of fiction as if it were some kind of terrorist threat."

"My story is based on fiction," said Poole, who faces a second-degree felony terrorist threatening charge. "It's a fake story. I made it up. I've been working on one of my short stories, (and) the short story they found was about zombies. Yes, it did say a high school. It was about a high school over ran by zombies."

Even so, police say the nature of the story makes it a felony. "Anytime you make any threat or possess matter involving a school or function it's a felony in the state of Kentucky," said Winchester Police detective Steven Caudill.

Student Arrested For Terroristic Threatening Says Incident A Misunderstanding (Thanks, Salim!)

Update: Turns out this is a couple years old!

For many years, we saw stories, usually pushed by security software companies, about how mobile phone viruses were some huge threat that had to be dealt with quickly before they spread around the world. Of course, that hasn't actually happened -- and there are some good reasons why it's unlikely. In fact, it seemed like such stories had been decreasing lately, perhaps in part due to some security firms scolding competitors for mobile virus FUD.

So, we were a bit surprised to see yet another story on the subject, this time suggesting that we're on the verge of (I'm not making this up) a "Cell Phone Zombie Uprising." Some researchers are predicting that mobile phones would be perfect for botnets, though, again it's not clear how that would actually happen, given the limitations of phones. While it is true that phones have become more powerful (and open) over the past few years, there still hasn't been much evidence that viruses and such are a real threat. Most phones are designed well enough to not make it easy for apps to just install themselves -- so consider us skeptical until there's real evidence of a mobile botnet rising.

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For many years, we saw stories, usually pushed by security software companies, about how mobile phone viruses were some huge threat that had to be dealt with quickly before they spread around the world. Of course, that hasn't actually happened -- and there are some good reasons why it's unlikely. In fact, it seemed like such stories had been decreasing lately, perhaps in part due to some security firms scolding competitors for mobile virus FUD.

So, we were a bit surprised to see yet another story on the subject, this time suggesting that we're on the verge of (I'm not making this up) a "Cell Phone Zombie Uprising." Some researchers are predicting that mobile phones would be perfect for botnets, though, again it's not clear how that would actually happen, given the limitations of phones. While it is true that phones have become more powerful (and open) over the past few years, there still hasn't been much evidence that viruses and such are a real threat. Most phones are designed well enough to not make it easy for apps to just install themselves -- so consider us skeptical until there's real evidence of a mobile botnet rising.

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