In the past, we've written numerous posts about the saga of so-called "sucks sites," which are websites on domain names that take a well-known brand and append the word "sucks" to the end (or something similarly denigrating) in an act of anger or protest. Many companies have tried to force such sites down using trademark law, but courts have pretty routinely held that sucks sites are perfectly legal.

But what about a "loves site"? What if someone loved your brand so much they set up a site with your brand and the word "love" before it? One of our readers alerts us to just such a scenario that happened a few months back, when Jack Daniel's threatened the owner of the website ILoveJackDaniels.com, suggesting that it was a trademark violation. The owner of the site gave in and handed over the domain name, but I wonder if such a claim would have stood up in court. It's difficult to see how the argument would be any different than with the "sucks sites" which are okay.

Perhaps, the only thing is that sucks sites may be protected because no one would confuse a sucks site with the real product site, because the sucks site is obviously trashing the product. With a "loves" site, you could argue that there might be a higher likelihood of confusion. Either way, how long will it be until we also have to explore this issue when it comes to "I-am-ambivalent-to- sites"? Well, okay, that one might not be any time soon.

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afabbro writes "Fifty years ago, before 'Pong' and 'Space Invaders,' a nuclear physicist created 'Tennis for Two,' a 2-D tennis game that some say was the first video game ever. Built in 1958, it was 'gynormous.' 'In addition to the oscilloscope screen and the controller, the guts of the original game were contained in an analog computer, which is "about as big as a microwave oven."' 'We have to load it into the back of a station wagon to move it. It's not a Game Boy that you put in your pocket.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An edible decorative for Halloween festivities that isn't a pumpkin - watermelon + some peeling & carving = melon brains!

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CWmike writes "Former Reserve Bank chairman Alan Greenspan has long praised technology as a tool to limit risks in financial markets. In 2005, he said better risk scoring by high-performance computing made it possible for lenders to extend credit to subprime borrowers. But today Greenspan told Congress that the data fed into financial systems was often a case of garbage in, garbage out. Christopher Cox, chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, told the committee that bad code led the credit rating agencies to give AAA ratings to mortgage-backed securities that didn't deserve them. Explaining in his testimony what failed, Cox noted a 2004 decision to rely on the computer models for assessing risks — a decision that essentially outsourced regulatory duties to Wall Street firms themselves."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

teddaw152 writes "I've been tasked with ordering an oscilloscope and a logic analyzer for use in a university physics lab, and have found several models that will likely suit our technical needs from the major manufacturers (Agilent, Tektronix, and LeCroy). However, I personally have only used legacy HP scopes, and thus I have no idea what modern features are must haves and which brand's user interface is the most intuitive. Is there anyone out there that has used modern Tektronix/Agilent/LeCroy scopes side by side and can comment on their thoughts from the purely subjective side?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In the past, we've discussed the oddity that moviemakers often purchase the rights to true stories before making movies about them. There's really no legal reason for them to do so -- as you can't copyright factual information. Anyone can make a movie based on a true story without purchasing any kinds of rights. Now, there may be some business reasons for doing so. Licensing the story from either those who were involved or who initially reported on it may allow you to have those people more involved in making the movie itself (though, that could just be handled by hiring them to advise, rather than "licensing" the story). Still, it did seem odd that it was so common for true stories to be "sold" this way.

Now a judge is reminding people that true stories aren't copyrightable. Rose M. Welch points out a ruling from a lawsuit filed by two filmmakers who had made a documentary called Ashes to Glory: The Tragedy and Triumph of Marshall Football, about the 1970 plane crash that killed the Marshall University football team, and the aftermath where the school tried to rebuild its football program. A few years ago, Warner Bros. made a (non-documentary) movie called We Are Marshall starring Matthew McConaughey about the same story. No one denies that Warner approached the documentary filmmakers about licensing their work -- but no agreement was reached.

The documentary makers then sued Warner for copyright infringement when their movie came out. However, a judge has dismissed the lawsuit, noting that you can't copyright facts, and most of the material in the film could easily have been gleaned from public news stories concerning the events. The judge also pointed out that We Are Marshall was heavily fictionalized and contains plenty that is unrelated to the documentary. As the judge noted: "Even though the two works have the same story as their subject, they are not substantially similar as the phrase is used in copyright jurisprudence."

It will be interesting to see if this leads studios to be less willing to license stories before making movies. This ruling also could mean bad news for the woman who claims to own the rights to the play Jersey Boys, as the situation there is pretty similar. Warner Bros. put out a statement saying how wonderful this decision was, though the company has its own history of overly aggressively trying to enforce its copyrights.

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Handmade metal USB skull rings, nice but pricey -- so might be a nice remake.

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Unigamer points out this article from BBC news briefly describing how University of California researchers have successfully used peeling adhesive tape to generate X-rays strong enough to scan a human finger. Cool - homemade X-ray machines can't be far behind!

Update: See the full video demonstration @ Nature.com

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Hugh from the Electronic Frontier Foundation sez, "By popular demand, we have made our NSA logo parody available on a t-shirt! It's only available with a membership donation of $65 or more -- money that will be put to work in the fight against illegal spying." EFF's New NSA Spying Shirts (Thanks, Hugh!)

ahab_2001 writes "The computer game Spore has been marketed partly as an experience that makes evolutionary biology come alive in a game setting. But does that claim hold water? To find out, John Bohannon, a correspondent for Science Magazine (writing as 'The Gonzo Scientist'), sat four card-carrying scientists, ranging from evolutionary biologist Niles Eldredge to JPL astrophysicist Miles Smith, down in front of a terminal to play the game. The upshot, says Bohannon: Spore flunks basic science, getting 'most of biology badly, needlessly, and often bizarrely wrong.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

ProdMod is running a contest to see who can create the coolest photo art using one of their LED hula hoops. You can enter by submitting your pics to the relevant Flickr photo pool. There's already some great shots in there such as the one above by Mudstone. Check ProdMod's site for more details - Awesome LED hoop photos on Flickr Pool-CONTEST

ProdMod LED Hula Hoop Kit

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Typically, to dial out from an office line you hit 9 first. BB's saint of author services at Federated Media, Mugs Buckley, tells me that's changing for a very interesting reason. Mugs writes:

FM used an 8 and the other office I'm in just changed their system to a 7 due to the San Mateo police department getting all upset (and I don't blame them) about how many false calls there are to their system.

If you've heard similar stories, please share them in the comments!

Ron Howard, Andy Grffith, and Henry Winkler revived some old characters in a pro-Obama "call to action." It's funny, cute, sentimental, and incredibly awkward and horrifying all at once.
Ron Howard's Call To Action (Thanks, Joel Johnson!)

tsa writes "Last week, the Dutch court subjected two kids of ages 15 and 14 to 160 hours of unpaid work or 80 days in jail, because they stole virtual property from a 13-year-old boy. The boy was kicked and beaten and threatened with a knife while forced to log into Runescape and giving his assets to the two perpetrators. This ruling is the first of its kind for the Netherlands. Ars Technica has some more background information." In Japan, meanwhile, a woman has been arrested for "illegally accessing a computer and manipulating electronic data" after (virtually) killing her (virtual) husband.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The "Cassette tape closet" fun project / idea if you have 900 tapes laying around...

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Andrew Keen, of course, is a guy who has written a laughably bad book about how only experts like himself should be able write things, because all those "amateurs" get stuff wrong. There are some who believe that Keen's entire personality is satire, because everything he accuses "amateurs" of doing, he does himself. He gets many facts wrong in his book. His writing is amateurish at best. His interpretations are laughable. He relies on incredibly weak reasoning -- all of which are things he insists that amteurs do, but pros such as himself don't do, because they have editors and such. The most amusing, of course, may be his condemnation of Larry Lessig, whose position he gets almost 100% factually incorrect.

So far, I have yet to read anything by Keen that isn't easily torn apart as laughably false, which reinforces the idea that everything he writes is satire. His latest piece, pointed out by Slashdot, is no exception. In it, Keen announces that the current financial crisis will put an end to open source and "free" business models because the crisis will mean that people actually have to make money.

Spot the rather obvious logical fallacy? The one even your sixth grader could point out? Right. Keen has set up a totally bogus strawman, that "open source" and "free" mean you don't make any money. As anyone who actually looks at the details knows, that's simply not true. Keen is so blinded by the word "free" he misses the fact that when people discuss the use of "free" as a part of a business model, they're talking about using it to make money. Instead, he seems to assume that "free" is the end of the discussion.

"One of the very few positive consequences of the current financial miasma will be a sharp cultural shift in our attitude toward the economic value of our labor. Mass unemployment and a deep economic recession comprise the most effective antidote to the utopian ideals of open-source radicals."

Funny, but part of the reason why all of those "user generated content" businesses took off in the first place was that after the dot com bubble burst, people had a lot of spare time on their hands. So they were more willing to contribute and take part in these things. Keen also seems to not realize that much of that user generated work and open source efforts are not about "utopian ideals" but very practical reasons that involve non-monetary benefits. People contribute to open source software not because they're idealistic, but because it helps them elsewhere. People blog and post videos on YouTube not because they're idealistic, but because they get value out of doing so.

The altruistic ideal of giving away one's labor for free appeared credible in the fat summer of the Web 2.0 boom when social-media startups hung from trees, Facebook was valued at $15 billion, and VCs queued up to fund revenue-less "businesses" like Twitter. But as we contemplate the world post-bailout, when economic reality once again bites, only Silicon Valley's wealthiest technologists can even consider the luxury of donating their labor to the latest fashionable, online, open-source project.

You know, I remember another business that had absolutely no business model right after the last bubble burst, even though venture capitalists had dumped $25 million into it at a very high valuation (which many -- including myself -- thought was ridiculous). That company became Google. According to Keen, that couldn't have happened, because who would ever invest in a company with no business model? Does Keen have no sense of history?

"I'm pretty sure, if not certain, that the idea of free labor will suddenly become profoundly unpalatable to someone faced with their house being repossessed or their kids going hungry. Being paid to work is intuitive to the human condition; it represents our most elemental sense of justice."

Again, that's not what happened during the last downturn, but why let facts get in the way? Also, this is still based on the false premise that there's no actual benefit for people and that they're only doing things for "utopian" ideals. That's simply untrue. If contributing to an open source project helps get you a well-paying job, is that utopian? If building an open source tool helps you jump start a different business, is that utopian? If blogging, Twittering or posting videos to YouTube helps you communicate cheaper, faster and better than other tools, is that utopian? Hardly. But Keen seems unable to consider these possibilities.

"So how will today's brutal economic climate change the Web 2.0 "free" economy? It will result in the rise of online media businesses that reward their contributors with cash.

Well, I certainly hope so, since we hand out plenty of cash to contributors at The Insight Community, but I still think Keen is wrong here. He again is dismissing or purposely ignoring the non-monetary value that people get. Let's look at his "winners" list:

"It will mean the success of Knol over Wikipedia, Mahalo over Google, TheAtlantic.com over the HuffingtonPost.com, iTunes over MySpace, Hulu over YouTube Inc. , Playboy.com over Voyeurweb.com, TechCrunch over the blogosphere, CNN's professional journalism over CNN's iReporter citizen-journalism.

Well, first off, some of those aren't actually competitors, so it seems rather unfair to suggest that's the case. However, I'd like to make a bet. While there are different estimates as to how long any recession might be, the general consensus is that we should hopefully start pulling out by the end of 2009 or early 2010. So, let's pick a few of these that we can measure, and I'll bet Andrew Keen $100 (really money, Andrew) that in two years, on October 22, 2010, Wikipedia still gets more traffic than Knol, that Google is still much, much, much bigger than Mahalo (if they're even considered competitors any more), and that YouTube gets more traffic than Hulu.

If any one of those is untrue, I'll write him a check. As for the other comparisons he makes, they don't seem to be particularly reasonable comparisons, so I don't see how to fairly evaluate how one wins over the other. TechCrunch is a part of the blogosphere, so how does that make sense? In fact, TechCrunch came out of the same "utopian" ideals that Keen dismisses. Michael Arrington started it for fun, with no plans to turn it into a business, but that's what it became. I thought Keen thought that wasn't possible? iReporter doesn't compete with CNN's professional news staff -- they work together. iTunes doesn't compete with MySpace -- they're in totally different businesses.

So, let's put some real money on this, Andrew. Or does Andrew Keen not really believe what he writes?

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Wellington Grey writes "Daylight saving time is shortly upon us. The arguments about its possible benefits and drawbacks come up twice every year. Does it save energy or lives? Possibly but it does definitely cause a great deal of inconvenience. My ask slashdot question is this: what do you think would be the best possible system to replace DTS with? What is the best way for humans to deal with the inconsistent amount of light over the year and still foster coordination over disparate time zones?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Hugh Pickens writes "Laura Holson writes in the NY Times that she 'wandered down to the T-Mobile store at Ninth Ave. and 43rd St. in New York City to see what kind of crowds — if any — were lining up to buy the new T-Mobile G1 which went on sale Wednesday' and saw no lines out the door, no crowding at the counter, and a complete lack of crowds. The iPhone appears to still be the gold standard and Etan Horowitz writes that the G1 'doesn't do a great job showcasing its potential. It isn't as intuitive as the iPhone, and it may take average users a while to figure out basic and advanced shortcuts and features' and 'may appeal more to techies who value open-source products and don't mind a somewhat steep learning curve.' Part of the reason for slow interest may also be that T-Mobile's 3G high-speed data network won't up and running in many cities until the end of the year."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

So.... some of you may have posted some comments on Techdirt this morning and are now noticing that those comments are gone. Kaput. Missing. This is especially ironic, considering the story this morning getting the most comments was about Amazon's "glitch" in deleting reviews. Well, we're not going to blame a glitch. We're going to blame ourselves for screwing up, royally. While doing some ordinary maintenance work, we accidentally blew up the entire comment database. That was fun. And, not only that, but our backup plan didn't quite work as planned, and we were only able to restore comments up through midnight last night. That means, basically, all the comments from the first 11 hours this morning are gone. Yes. This sucks. Yes, all of us here feel completely awful about it. And, yes, guess what we're doing today? That's right: building a better backup system. So, our sincerest, deepest apologies for screwing this one up. But, if you commented earlier, and feel like taking a second chance at saying what you said, get to it.

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The carved animal figure above may be the oldest child's toy in Britain. Archaeologists from the University of Bristol found it last month near Stonhehnge and think it's at least 2,000 years old. They dug it out of a young child's grave. There is some debate about whether the toy is a pig or hedgehog.

The Bronze Age figurine was likely made as a toy or in memory of the baby being stillborn or dying in infancy, archaeologist (Joshua Pollard) said...

Evidence of toys during this period in British history is "extremely scant," Pollard said.

"In fact, it's very rare to find any kind of representational art in British prehistory—almost to the extent where you get the impression there's a bit of a taboo on making images of animals or people."

"Britain's Oldest Toy Found Buried With Stonehenge Baby?"

Earlier this week, in writing about some kids convicted of theft in the real world, I jokingly asked if we'd soon hear of someone arrested for "murder" for killing a virtual character. Who knew it would happen so fast? Okay, actually, it's not that extreme, but a woman in Japan has been arrested (in real life) for "killing" the avatar of her virtual husband, who had apparently "virtually" divorced her. The charges are not for murder (phew), but illegally accessing his computer. She basically logged in to his account and killed off the character. Of course, you might argue that she didn't do anything illegal, since the guy had given her his password in "happier times" and hadn't changed it. Also, again, this certainly seems like the sort of thing that could (and should) have been taken care of directly in the world. The folks who run the world could easily revive the guy, and kick the woman out of the world. Case closed.

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Excellent video series "The Machine That Changed The World" spotted via True Films.

The Machine That Changed The World
WGBH Television and BBC 1992

Part 1: Great Brains
Part 2: Inventing the Future
Part 3: The Paperback Computer
Part 4: The Thinking Machine
Part 5: The World at Your Fingertips
Also available as a single BitTorrent file from Waxy.org

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Mike Prevette, aka Freedomfromgravity, made a cool flashing lights/bleepy-bloopy raygun, driven by a PICAXE-08M.

Blinky Sh*t

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Luminary Crush writes with this excerpt from PhysOrg about the permanance of leaving Earth for Mars, at least for early travelers: "The first astronauts sent to Mars should be prepared to spend the rest of their lives there, in the same way that European pioneers headed to America knowing they would not return home, says moonwalker Buzz Aldrin. '[the distance and difficulty is why you should] send people there permanently,' Aldrin said. 'If we are not willing to do that, then I don't think we should just go once and have the expense of doing that and then stop.'" On the other hand, maybe they'll catch a ride back with Carrie-Anne Moss.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I think this is a great start to a cool prop for your Halloween Party or Haunted House but it's missing something. Right now it just looks like it's drooling. What it really needs is a jerking motion or a small motor to make it move back and then forward randomly. So MAKERS what should we add to make it actually vomit?

Also do you have something like this to share? Take some time and upload it to our YouTube Halloween Contest today!

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Joel Johnson spent several days living with the T-Mobile G1, the first Google Android phone. His review, posted to BB Gadgets, is a deep critique of the product but it also contains a thoughtful meditation on gadget reviews in general. From his post:

Products are not simply loved or hated, but appreciated over time on a scale which terminates with perfection at one extreme, failure to operate at the other. That scale can be broken down in any number of metrics, all of which are useless: what matters to the owner of a product is not where a reviewer, a single sample, has chosen to mark his opinion at an arbitrary point in time on the scale, but in what direction that point is heading. (And to a lesser and murkier degree, for how long that trend will continue.)

What's lost in the review — the direction of love — is critical. Like romantic love, a slide towards increasing love helps us overlook flaws, remember only the best aspects of our products' features, and gives the relationship between a product and its owner time to flourish and grow. Hidden delights will show themselves after a time, reinforcing the relationship, even as unaddressed incompatibilities might, after a measure, begin to tilt affection towards declination.

"A few days with the T-Mobile G1, the first Google Android phone"

Impossible not be happy once you see this.

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They're not Make or Craft, but a few other magazines do have a healthy sprinkling of DIY projects among their archives. Here's a good one from Homepower: Passive Solar Retrofit... In A Weekend (pdf).

As I find sustainable projects, especially those that are lower-tech, I find it interesting to look at any disadvantages and think about how appropriate, low-cost technology might reduce them. From the Homepower article, here are the cons:

• You have to remember to raise the garage door in the morning and shut it at night

• By itself, provides less security than the garage door (substituting twin-wall polycarbonate glazing could help, because it's more impact-resistant than acrylic)

• On cloudy days, some form of backup heat may be necessary to keep the shop space comfortable

• Over time, the acrylic panels may become scratched, marring the glazing's appearance

• Outward-opening doors might be an inconvenience, especially if there is a lot of snow and ice on the driveway or it is necessary to park close to the building

One could easily address the first 3:
-Close garage door via timer connected to garage door opener
-Add a motion-detecting exterior light to improve security (or, just don't worry about it because your door's closing itself at night)
-Adapt a cleaner, heirloom technology (here's one candidate) to add supplemental heat when necessary

What other ideas do you have to improve this basic project, while keeping costs low and complexity manageable?

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In more virtual crime news, a Tokyo woman was jailed for "murdering" her ex-husband. Well, kinda. The 43-year-old logged in to the man's Maple Story account and killed his avatar. From the AP:

She has not yet been formally charged. If convicted, she could face up to five years in prison or a fine up to $5,000...

When bad deeds lead to criminal charges, prosecutors have found a real-world activity to cite — as in this case, in which the woman was charged with inappropriate computer access.

Woman jailed after 'killing' virtual husband

Previously on BB:
• Teens convicted of virtual theft

snydeq writes "Developers seeking job security in the years ahead could find an unlikely edge in Cobol. According to an InfoWorld report, demand for Cobol skills is surging, with salaries on the rise. More importantly, the short supply of offshore Cobol programmers and the fact that mainframes aren't going away anytime soon are spurring longevity for big-iron skills, with many companies looking to hire in-house Cobol pros to bridge mainframe Cobol apps to the rest of the enterprise. The report provides further evidence that Cobol may indeed be primed for a comeback, with new kinds of Cobol integration jobs emerging to prove old-guard skills are critical to some of the hottest areas of software development today."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The first wave farm is open for biz, er, waving...

The world’s first commercial wave farm went live at the end of September in Agucadoura, located off the coast of northern Portugal. Designed by Pelamis Wave Power, the farm employs three Wave Energy Converters - snakelike, semi-submerged devices that generate electricity with hydraulic rams driven by waves. This first phase of the new renewable energy farm is rated at 2.25 MW with 3 machines, and the the second phase will add an additional 25 machines to bring the capacity to 21 MW - enough to power 15,000 homes.

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Two Danish Dutch teenagers were convicted of virtually roughing up a classmate in the multiplayer online game RuneScape and stealing some virtual goods from him. From the Associated Press:

"These virtual goods are goods (under Dutch law), so this is theft," the court said on Tuesday in a summary of its ruling...

The 15-year-old was sentenced to 200 hours service, and the 14-year-old to 160 hours.

"Teens convicted of virtual theft"

The financial crisis is certainly the result of a series of rather complex situations, and with many people rushing to try to understand what happened, plenty of totally incorrect, but very simplified, explanations are being proffered: it was the Republicans fault! It was the Democrats fault! Free market economics doesn't work! Poor people are to blame! None of these are even close to accurate, but it leads people to come up with positively nutty suggestions for how we should react -- and what's more troubling is that some of these suggestions come from well-respected individuals who should know better. In the past few days, we've seen two absolutely ridiculous suggestions, which would make problems much, much worse, but are apparently suggested in all seriousness.

The first is apparently in the latest issue of the Harvard Business Review, where two business school professors suggest that business managers should be licensed, similar to doctors and lawyers. That's a fantastic idea if you want to basically destroy business growth. In fact, we've already examined how these sorts of "professional unions" often are really designed to simply inflate prices for services by limiting the supply of service providers. These sorts of licensing systems often do little to actually "protect" consumers, but do plenty to make them pay more. If you added the same situation to business managers, you'd make running any kind of business significantly more expensive, while removing from the pool of potential managers plenty of people who would excel at the job. While you can at least understand some of the reasoning for licensing some professions, management is one where it's hard to see any rationale, as creativity and out-of-the-box thinking is often what managers need the most.

The second also seems to come from the medical profession, and it would be to purposely slow down innovation by forcing all new financial instruments to go through a complex approval process similar to what it takes for drugs to be approved. I can't think of a better way to kill the economy than that. I've been meaning to dig into some of the problems with the health care system for a few months (though, the whole financial crisis has pushed that back), and one of the biggest problems with it right now is the process for approving drugs, which often does more harm than good. Extending that broken process to other businesses, such as the financial industry, would basically ensure that money would quickly flow out of the US and into other countries that have more reasonable financial systems.

I can understand the desire to come up with big solutions to "fix" the problems that created this financial mess, but suggestions like these are simply scary overreactions by people who don't seem to understand what really caused the problems. Both of these suggestions would make things significantly worse, based on the false belief that you can somehow have some body (government or licensing body) that can decide what's "good" and what's "bad" for business.

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QUEST teamed up with us to show you how to make a tabletop linear accelerator that demonstrates the finer points of kinetic energy by shooting a steel ball.

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Jens Almström realized that the screw inside his bicycle bell was the same size as the screw on his tripod. So now his bike bell is easily converted into a camera mount! He posted a simple HOWTO about it. Bicycam (Thanks, Jess Hemerly!)

An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft said late Wednesday that it plans to release a critical security update today to plug a security hole present in all supported versions of Windows. The company hasn't released any details about the patch yet, which is expected to be pushed out at 1 p.m. PT. Normally, Redmond issues security updates on Patch Tuesday, the second Tuesday of each month. The Washington Post's Security Fix blog notes that each of the three times in the past that Microsoft has departed from its patch cycle, it was to fix some really nasty vulnerability that criminals already were exploiting to break into Windows PCs." Reader filenavigator points out an article which describes the hole as an SMB vulnerability, and says it "allows anyone to access a Windows machine remotely without any user name or password. Any machine that exposes Windows file sharing is vulnerable." Update: 10/23 17:42 GMT by T : Reader AngryDad adds a link to Microsoft's more detailed memo.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

We are looking for a Maker in the Madison, WI area, please contact us! mark@rosengrouppr.com 212-255-8455 x225

Update: We got some folks, thanks! No need to contact us unless you want to just say hi.

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A couple weeks ago, my colleagues at Institute for the Future launched Superstruct, an alternate reality game set in the year 2019. In the game world, 2019 is a pretty intense time to be a human. Our species could be wiped out in just 23 years by a variety of superthreats, like disease, food shortages, environmental devastation, and power struggles (er, unbelievable as that may sound). Superstruct is an opportunity to imagine how we might solve global problems, if we can solve them. The game will be played for another month and you can join any time. From the Superstruct FAQ:

Q: What does "superstruct" mean?
Su`per`struct´ v. t. 1.To build over or upon another structure; to erect upon a foundation. Superstructing is what humans do. We build new structures on old structures. We build media on top of language and communication networks. We build communities on top of family structures. We build corporations on top of platforms for manufacturing, marketing, and distribution. Superstructing has allowed us to survive in the past and it will help us survive the super-threats...

Q: How do I play Superstruct?
A: Superstruct is played on forums, blogs, videos, wikis, and other familiar online spaces. We show you the world as it might look in 2019. You show us what it's like to live there. Bring what you know and who you know, and we'll all figure out how to make 2019 a world we want to live in.

Superstruct

Glyn Moody writes "After running some successful pilots, the Russian government has decided to make open source the standard for all schools. If a school doesn't want to use the free software supplied by the government, it has to buy commercial licenses using its own funds. What's the betting Microsoft starts slashing its prices in Russia?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

There's a big difference between lazy and efficient. Sometimes the latter comes off looking like the former.

"Ever wish songs just sang what was happening in the music video? Well now they do." (via) #

You probably remember the uproar that surrounded the release of Spore, where plenty of people were pissed off at EA's decision to use draconian DRM and made their feelings known via thousands of 1-star reviews on Amazon.com. At one point, all of those reviews disappeared from the site, leading some to accuse Amazon of censoring the reviews. Amazon quickly said that it was a glitch and the reviews came back.

However, it appears that "glitch" has come back -- and once again it's for thousands of DRM complaints on an EA game. EA released Crysis Warhead with the same awful SecuROM DRM, and the reviews made that clear. But, just as with Spore, the Crysis Warhead reviews magically disappeared. Amazon is once again claiming that it was a glitch, just like last time. As the article notes, there is one possibility, which is that Amazon has an automated system that tries to flag spam reviews, and the actions of the DRM complainers triggers that mechanism. That would make some amount of sense, though Amazon shouldn't keep calling it a glitch if that's the case.

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So, I have to give kuddos to Global Industries for doing the best job I've ever seen publishing information about a workbench. If you're a maker that ships things for a living, this is a nice bench. Global isn't an advertiser or anything like, they just did a great job with showing exactly what they're selling.

Heavy Duty Packaging Workbench with Square Edge Plastic Top... This packaging workbench has a 1-5/8" thick plastic top with a square edge supported by heavy-duty 2" square 14 gauge steel tubular legs that adjust from 28-34"H at 2" increments and are tested to 5,000 lb. capacity. The super-strong, easy-to-clean bench top is made of high pressure plastic laminate-faced wood-core takes heavy abuse. It provides a smooth, tough working surface for many applications. Includes adjustable leveling floor glides and leveling foot plates that allow floor anchoring. Customize your packaging workbench by adding the packaging riser, lower packaging shelf, standard lower shelf or the stackable drawers.

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Brad Robideau of NPR says:

The practice of short selling has been blamed for the collapse of several major companies’ shares during the financial crisis. What is short selling? In this video, “Getting naked in short selling,” Marketplace senior editor Paddy Hirsch is back at the whiteboard to explain the complexities of the markets.

All of the videos can be accessed at www.marketplace.org and are part of "Fallout: America's Financial Crisis," Marketplace's comprehensive coverage of the current financial crisis.

Getting naked in short selling

Dale says: "A silly decision in NYC to fine a librarian for saying nice things about his daughter's illustrations for a book, a manga edition of Macbeth."

For 39 years as an educator, Robert Grandt has been promoting other people’s books. So this year, when his daughter helped create a graphic novel of Macbeth of which he was mighty proud, Mr. Grandt could not resist bragging a little in the newsletter he distributes as librarian at Brooklyn Technical High School.

“Best New Book: Grandt, Eve, Shakespeare’s Macbeth — The Manga Edition,” he wrote under the heading Grandt’s Picks. graphic novelMr. Grandt’s daughter Eve did the artwork for the graphic novel “Shakespeare’s Macbeth: The Manga Edition.”

He also placed a few copies of the book at a library display table, and posted a sign: “Best Book Ever Written.” If someone was interested, they got a book free.

But one person’s parental pride is another panel’s ethical transgression.

On Monday, the city’s Conflicts of Interest Board announced it had settled a case it had brought against Mr. Grandt for promoting his daughter’s work. He agreed to pay a $500 fine and admit in a three-page stipulation that he had violated the city ethics code.

Librarian fined $500 for saying nice things about his daughter's book

Today on Boing Boing tv, a music video about life and death in the New Depression: Mom and Pop Killer, by Bay Area "intelligent hip-hop" artist The Grouch. (a special thanks to director Isaac Klotz.)

Barence writes "An open-source digital rights management (DRM) scheme says it's ready to supplant Apple and Microsoft as the world's leading copy protection solution. Marlin, which is backed by companies such as Sony and Samsung, has just announced a new partner program that aims to drive the DRM system into more consumer devices. 'It works in a way that doesn't hold consumers hostage,' Talal Shamoon told PC Pro. 'It allows you to protect and share content in the home, in a way that people own the content, not the devices.' When asked about the biggest problem of DRM — that customers hate it — he argued that 'the biggest problem with DRM is people have implemented it badly. Make DRM invisible and people will use it.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This is my next drop-everything project.

http://aws.amazon.com/windows/

I'll be running software there soon, Murphy-willing.

Mary Jo says Amazon is releasing this stuff today in anticipation of something similar from Microsoft next week.

I just took a look at the docs for setting up Windows in EC2 and geez, it's got a lot of weird hoops to jump through. I don't see why getting started has to be any more complicated than setting up a new Windows machine, which believe me, I have plenty of experience with. Then if I want to do more fancy stuff later, I can learn how to do it later. It seems like all the arcane stuff has to be addressed up front.

Command-line tools? Really? Oh please help. I haven't used a command line since I left MS-DOS in the early 90s.

Maybe Elasticfox circumvents all the command line stuff? I'll give it a look.

I've had mucho success getting Elasticfox set up. Not really sure what it's doing, but it sounds like it's doing the same thing as the command line tools but with a browser-based GUI which is what I'm kind of used to (I use the S3 Organizer Firefox tool to do interactive management of my S3 storage). Elasticfox is similar in approach to that.

Feedback to anyone at Amazon who's listening -- your docs tell you too much if all you want to do is get started. You should get the user to a Remote Desktop Connection window of a functioning server asap. I'm working through the Elasticfox docs, and they're telling me so much more than I need to know (even though this time I understand it cause it's in terms that I understand). Also I think you should steer people to this tool up front, not make it a maze they have to climb around to figure out what to use. This could be a lot easier.

At 11:54AM -- I've got my Windows instance running in Remote Desktop from a Mac. That was really cool. Elasticfox gets you all the way there. Very nice!

First thing to do -- install Firefox. Looking around, I've got 160GB to play with. Should be plenty. Two drives, C and D. C has 10GB and D has 150GB. Install Firefox on C.

Next I want to do a speed test, to see how fast the Internet connection is. That requires that I install Flash. When I try to download it I get a security error. I didn't know Firefox had anything like that. Not sure how to change that. Later... Turns out Firefox 3 respects security settings of Windows. Instructions are here.

Okay so I'm running the speed test now. It says my server is in Seattle. Hah. Makes sense.





Okay, I'm ready to take a break now. I consider this a success and I think I'll be using this service, probably starting right away.

Next thing I have to figure out is if the IP address of this server is persistent. I saw something about that in the EC2 FAQ. I'm sure I'll have a lot of suggestions for them. I'm quite excited about the possibilities of providing turnkey servers for end-users. I don't think there's any problem with this being an end-user service, their docs just need better organization, but there's nothing to say I can't write some new docs. Lots of possibilities here.

This is my next drop-everything project.

http://aws.amazon.com/windows/

I'll be running software there soon, Murphy-willing.

Mary Jo says Amazon is releasing this stuff today in anticipation of something similar from Microsoft next week.

I just took a look at the docs for setting up Windows in EC2 and geez, it's got a lot of weird hoops to jump through. I don't see why getting started has to be any more complicated than setting up a new Windows machine, which believe me, I have plenty of experience with. Then if I want to do more fancy stuff later, I can learn how to do it later. It seems like all the arcane stuff has to be addressed up front.

Command-line tools? Really? Oh please help. I haven't used a command line since I left MS-DOS in the early 90s.

Maybe Elasticfox circumvents all the command line stuff? I'll give it a look.

I've had mucho success getting Elasticfox set up. Not really sure what it's doing, but it sounds like it's doing the same thing as the command line tools but with a browser-based GUI which is what I'm kind of used to (I use the S3 Organizer Firefox tool to do interactive management of my S3 storage). Elasticfox is similar in approach to that.

Feedback to anyone at Amazon who's listening -- your docs tell you too much if all you want to do is get started. You should get the user to a Remote Desktop Connection window of a functioning server asap. I'm working through the Elasticfox docs, and they're telling me so much more than I need to know (even though this time I understand it cause it's in terms that I understand). Also I think you should steer people to this tool up front, not make it a maze they have to climb around to figure out what to use. This could be a lot easier.

At 11:54AM -- I've got my Windows instance running in Remote Desktop from a Mac. That was really cool. Elasticfox gets you all the way there. Very nice!

First thing to do -- install Firefox. Looking around, I've got 160GB to play with. Should be plenty. Two drives, C and D. C has 10GB and D has 150GB. Install Firefox on C.

Next I want to do a speed test, to see how fast the Internet connection is. That requires that I install Flash. When I try to download it I get a security error. I didn't know Firefox had anything like that. Not sure how to change that. Later... Turns out Firefox 3 respects security settings of Windows. Instructions are here.

Okay so I'm running the speed test now. It says my server is in Seattle. Hah. Makes sense.





Okay, I'm ready to take a break now. I consider this a success and I think I'll be using this service, probably starting right away.

Next thing I have to figure out is if the IP address of this server is persistent. I saw something about that in the EC2 FAQ. I'm sure I'll have a lot of suggestions for them. I'm quite excited about the possibilities of providing turnkey servers for end-users. I don't think there's any problem with this being an end-user service, their docs just need better organization, but there's nothing to say I can't write some new docs. Lots of possibilities here.

I WAS RECENTLY CORRECTED BY THE INTERNET regarding a very embarrassing misstatement regarding GNOMES.

YOU PERHAPS remember this remarkable book. In the early eighties it marked the height of the ILLUSTRATED FANTASY COFFEE TABLE BOOK CRAZE that we all remember, and even enjoyed its own animated special and series.

UNLIKE FROUD AND LEE'S "Faeries," "Gnomes" was not just an album of annotated illustrations, it was an ENTIRE FAKE ENCYCLOPEDIA of gnomic life and culture, explaining in great, unnecessary detail the way they built their homes, pitched their woo, and cured their ailments.

YOU MAY THUS APPRECIATE its attraction to me. Like the best books, it is unclear exactly who it was meant to reach. I may attest that children enjoy it, but it is very, ridiculously sophisticated and remarkably, bizarrely, europeanly frank about the gnome's physical and sexual lives. And while there is some discussion now on the internet about exactly how much Gnome nudity is in the book, I will settle the argument now: THERE IS ENOUGH.

HOWEVER, I was wrong. The authors, Wil Huygen and Rien Poortvliet, are not in any way Norwegian, as I claimed in a recent interview, but DUTCH.

I REGRET THE ERROR.

Ben writes in -

So glad I found them with more than a week before Halloween -- definitely making these! Look like real eyes, but they light up. They show you how to make the mask too! Never seen such detailed diagrams. You can print and then layout each component over the printout. I've never done an electronics project before, but this makes it look really easy.

Nicely made video, the animated schematics are useful.

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I love this one - "haunted" books are pushed forward and snap back into place with the help of cams and elastic cords.

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Bruce Schneier writes:

Kip Hawley, head of the TSA, has responded to my airport security penetration testing, published in The Atlantic.

Unfortunately, there's not really anything to his response. It's obvious he doesn't want to admit that they've been checking ID's all this time to no purpose whatsoever, so he just emits vague generalities like a frightened squid filling the water with ink. Yes, some of the stunts in article are silly (who cares if people fly with Hezbollah T-shirts?) so that gives him an opportunity to minimize the real issues.

JP writes "Andrew Bartlett of Samba fame has written a document describing their recent collaboration with Microsoft's Active Directory team. In brief, it would seem that the sky is falling, as Microsoft's engineers seem to be really committed to making Samba fully interoperable with AD. They have organized interoperability fests and have knowledgeable engineers answering technical questions without legal or marketing drones getting in the way. However according to Andrew the Samba AD team is currently very short on manpower, so if you have network experience, now is the time to get coding."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apparently, the Department of Homeland Security would like to add another layer of security theater to the airplane boarding process. Homeland Security is now taking over the process of matching your identity to government watch lists at airports (away from the airlines), and they're going to start demanding more info. You will not be allowed to fly if you don't provide your first and last names, birth date and gender. This is positioned as a way to avoid the various "false positives" we've heard so much about with fliers who have similar names to those on the no-fly list. While it's good that they want to cut down on those false positives, it's not as if this makes you any safer. It just requires giving up more privacy to fly.

Also worth noting is that this is the first time that the government has actually admitted how many people are on the no fly list (about 2,500) as well as the "selectee" list for extra careful searches (another 16,000). They also noted that it's quite rare for anyone on the no-fly list to actually try to fly (about once a month -- and it's almost always initiating in a foreign country). Of course, if you were actually a terrorist, would you fly under your real identity?

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ruphus13 writes "The Linux Foundation's recently released report claims, ""it would take approximately $10.8 billion to build the Linux community distribution Fedora 9 in today's dollars with today's software development costs". The article states why this might actually understate the value of the distros, though, since it doesn't include the power of the brand and the goodwill value. "There were several approaches that the Linux Foundation employed to reach the $10.8 billion dollar figure, including calculating the number of lines of code in Fedora 9 (204,500,946), and using an average programmer's salary of $75,662.08--as determined by the U.S. Department of Labor--to measure development costs...On the balance sheets of Coca Cola and many other huge corporations, you find goodwill listed as a major asset.""

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This RFID wearable flower is a nice way to integrate the technology in your clothing without making it seem too obvious that you are being mischevious. Well you might be mistaken for a magician instead.

Anab Jain Projects via NeoNomad

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Gottfried writes in about the DS brut -

Hi there, at the beginning of this year, Gordan Savicic (who did the infamous "contraint city" wifi-nds-corset project, featured on MAKE blog, WMMNA and others) and myself desperately needed an I/O card for the Nintendo DS for a project of ours. So we set out to build one, reverse engineered all missing bits of documentation, build prototypes, wrote software for it and finally had a small batch of our printed circuit board designs made in China, we now want to share with our fellow makers. The device allows for easy, Arduino-style access to all kind of hardware interfaces, like an UART, GPIO pins, PWM output, analog/digital converters, I²C bus - which allow you too get readings from all kinds of sensors and control devices, all directly from within Nintendo DS code. Best of it: it's all open, and the code running on the embedded Atmega168 chip can be very easily updated/tinkered around with, using available and free tools.

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Huh, this really big news - Make 3D printable STL files directly from a Google SketchUp model with CADspan's plugin... via Fabbaloo.

Creating a 3D printing file from a Google SketchUp file has never been easy. Today a new class of 3D printing technology has slashed the time and expense it takes to create a physical model. Our friends at CADspan just released a plugin that allows for the generation of solid, 3D printable files directly from a Google SketchUp model. This software re-creates a model by "shrink-wrapping" it with one continuous mesh. The result is a single object, in STL file format, that is completely solid and ready-to-print.

3D printers create a physical object from a digital model by first dividing it into thin virtual “slices.” Then, the printers build the physical model, one layer at a time. These machines can typically build a shoe box sized object with almost any detail, overnight.

The new CADspan plugin makes 3D printing from Google SketchUp easier than ever. Install the plugin, and use the included tools to clean up and put some finishing touches on the model. When ready to export, click upload and let CADspan's servers take care of the rest. Then, go right on to working on your next Google SketchUp project while the first model is being resurfaced. When it's finished, simply download the STL file, review it, and the model is ready to print.

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Slatterz writes "It seems nobody can agree on a universal set of tests for rating anti-virus software, with Eugene Kaspersky the latest to weigh in on the topic, criticizing the well-known Virus Bulletin 100. Kaspersky is one of several big anti-virus brands to fall foul of the VB100 tests, reportedly failing to pass a recent test of security software on Windows Server 2008, along with F-Secure and Computer Associates. At Kaspersky, bloggers have pointed out that they don't focus on detecting PoCs, calling it a 'dead end,' and saying their anti-virus database focuses on 'real threats and exploits.' 'I don't want to say it's rubbish,' Kaspersky told PC Authority. 'But the security experts don't pay attention to these tests. It doesn't reflect the real level of protection.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slatterz writes "It seems no-one can agree on a universal set of tests for rating anti-virus software, with Eugene Kaspersky the latest to weigh-in on the topic, criticising the well-known Virus Bulletin 100. Kaspersky is one of several big anti-virus brands to fall foul of the VB100 tests, reportedly failing to pass a recent test of security software on Windows Server 2008, along with F-Secure and Computer Associates. At Kaspersky, bloggers have pointed out that they don't focus on detecting PoCs, calling it a "dead end", and saying their antivirus database focuses on "real threats and exploits." "I don't want to say it's rubbish," Kaspersky told PC Authority. "But the security experts don't pay attention to these tests. It doesn't reflect the real level of protection.""

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

There's a "summit" in NYC for new business models for news today.

Through the miracle of the Internet, I can participate too!

Here's what I think...

Where ever you see a barrier that says that only a professional can do this job, don't just get rid of the rule, proactively break it. Make the pros compete on the same playing field as the amateurs. The time is running short to do this, soon the professional news organizations won't have anything of value to the amateurs nor will there be many pros left to compete.

Here are some examples.

1. Get amateur bloggers through the hurdles necessary to cover political events. Give them credentials that the campaigns recognize. Help amateurs get on the press lists of of the campaigns. (My experience in the 2008 election -- McCain and Obama ignored all requests, Clinton hit me up for money.)

2. Put an amateur on your op-ed page along with the pros. A regular columnist, not a guest column, so they can build up some sway, and learn how it works.

3. Take news reports from amateurs and run them through the same editorial process. Then you will have amateurs participating in the editorial process.

4. Open your newsroom! After all your layoffs, you've got plenty of space. Have a budget of 20 local bloggers who have press room passes. This means of course that you have to get to know some of the local bloggers.

Each of these steps will create context for interaction, places where assumptions are challenged, where the arguments can happen, so people on both sides can find out what comes next. The whole discussion, as clearly shown by the participant list (they call them attendees, that's another mistake) for the NY conference, has been between people on one side. No wonder they're not figuring it out!

Now, I'm afraid this advice would have worked a lot better ten years ago, but believe me, I was pushing for the barriers to come down ten years ago too.

Anyway, hope y'all have a great conference.

PS: There's live video!

?Ring in the spirit of Halloween and the election in one fell swoop with these political pumpkins. Pretty funny depictions of Obama and Palin, while the McCain and Biden ones were probably just too freaky to show.

via Core77

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Apparently, it's not just the US that has decided to jump back into the murky waters of charging people with obscenity charges for stuff they put online. Over in the UK, a guy is facing an obscenity charge for a bit of fiction that he wrote. There are communities of folks online who often write fiction involving "famous" characters, whether from TV or movies or, in some cases, from real life. The whole concept, frankly, strikes me as a little bit odd, but for those who want to do it, I don't see why they shouldn't be allowed to do so. In this case, the guy wrote some apparently graphic fiction about a band in the UK and is now being charged with publishing obscene materials. If he loses, I would imagine that there are large groups of folks who post this sort of (yes, ridiculously distasteful) stuff online, who could be facing similar charges. I have enough difficulty understanding obscenity laws that go after people in online communities where the content is, in no way, pushed on others -- but it seems even more bizarre to include obscenity charges for fictional writing.

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Chad VanGaalen makes music with a variety of objects turned instruments, including motorized mallets that bang on old drums and other objects he found while sifting through trash containers. Check out the samples on the link below, especially "Flower Gardens" which has some nice solos from the homebrew devices.

Chad Vangaalen on Sub Pop Records

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Ostracus writes "It sounds like science fiction, but scientists say it might one day be possible to erase undesirable memories from the brain, selectively and safely. After exposing mice to emotionally powerful stimuli, such as a mild shock to their paws, the scientists then observed how well or poorly the animals subsequently recalled the particular trauma as their brain's expression of CaMKII was manipulated up and down. When the brain was made to overproduce CaMKII at the exact moment the mouse was prodded to retrieve the traumatic memory, the memory wasn't just blocked, it appeared to be fully erased."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I picked up 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea: A Pop-Up Book yesterday after being poleaxed by it in a bookstore window. Paper engineer Sam Ita has created a magnificent, giggle-inducing, gorgeous adaptation of the classic Jules Verne tale, retelling the story with a series of gigantic, page-bursting pop-up effects that push the limits of paper technology. The story is retold using charming Tin Tin-esque comics-panels, and there's just enough verbiage there to glue together the vast and hypnotic paper-effects.

At 8 months, my daughter Poesy has just started to turn pages on books, and she was completely mesmerised by this one, slowly turning the page, then closing it, then opening it again, visibly delighted by the clever ways that the paper unfolded -- and unfolded -- and unfolded. Each scene has lots of little easter eggs and secondary scenes in it too, little grace notes that turn this from a merely great book to a world-class piece of paper-fetish. 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea: A Pop-Up Book

I love this student design-project: a wardrobe made out of a pile of suitcases:

Now showing as part of Dutch Design Week, the graduate show at Design Academy Eindhoven includes Maarten De Ceulaer’s A Pile of Suitcases. Designer de Ceulaer graduated in 2008, and already his Pile of Suitcases is garnering lots of attention.

While the project seems simple enough—a wardrobe made from a grouping of suitcases—it evinces de Ceulaer’s peculiar philosophy of combining the poetic with the practical: “I try to base my designs on a strong, simple and pure concept… to question what I see around me, and translate that in an object. I think poetry, humour and communication of ideas are very important aspects of my designs, but at the same time I want to make useful and functional objects with that way of thinking.” A Pile of Suitcases wardrobe comes with “well-measured compartments” and “steel profiles [that] keep the pile firmly together.” In its construction, the piece responds to the very real needs of its user.

A Pile of Suitcases (via Cribcandy)

You know those new, super-secure, RFID-enabled passports the US is issuing to its citizens? They're manufactured and assembled offshore, in sometimes-unstable regions, the blanks are shipped around using unsecured couriers, and they're sold to US citizens at an 85 percent profit. I feel safer already.

Each new e-passport contains a small computer chip inside the back cover that contains the passport number along with the photo and other personal data of the holder. The data is secured and is transmitted through a tiny wire antenna when it is scanned electronically at border entry points and compared to the actual traveler carrying it.

According to interviews and documents, GPO managers rejected limiting the contracts to U.S.-made computer chip makers and instead sought suppliers from several countries, including Israel, Germany and the Netherlands.

Mr. Somerset, the GPO spokesman, said foreign suppliers were picked because "no domestic company produced those parts" when the e-passport production began a few years ago.

After the computer chips are inserted into the back cover of the passports in Europe, the blank covers are shipped to a factory in Ayutthaya, Thailand, north of Bangkok, to be fitted with a wire Radio Frequency Identification, or RFID, antenna. The blank passports eventually are transported to Washington for final binding, according to the documents and interviews.

Outsourced passports netting govt. profits, risking national security (via Beyond the Beyond)

Is your lawn is filled with lots of Halloween decorations? Yes! Well, how about making a skull-topped fence to keep the kiddies off? Check out the website for the complete build instructions.

We built the fence in standard sections of 8 feet wide. The finished height is a bit over 5 feet. Each section has two horizontal pieces made from 1x2 lumber, and space for 13 vertical pieces made from 1/2-inch PVC pipe, at 8-inch intervals.

More about making a Halloween Graveyard Fence

DIY HALLOWEEN from MAKE & CRAFT!

It's here!! DIY HALLOWEEN 2007 from the editors of MAKE and CRAFT brings you 40-plus DIY projects for the holiday that's made for makers. From the craftiest costumes to amazing animated props and the latest in computer-controlled haunted house effects - Link.

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Modern Fred's scans of vintage Japanese movie-monster posters include some spectacular pieces, none moreso than the anatomical cutaways of Godzilla, Gamera and co. I always wondered about their skeletal structure! Kaiju Eiga (via Geisha Asobi)

The 2008 election campaign considered as a conversation around a D&D table. This is pure nerdy political hilarity. The Kucinich bits? Priceless.

OBAMA: "My friends, I am a totally unoriginal grizzled character class stereotype. I should lead the party because I have more testicular damage than that one."

MCCAIN: Yeah, well, you pal around with dark elves.

OBAMA: OH NO YOU DIDN'T.

MCCAIN: Whatever, so's your mom.

OBAMA: So's your FACE.

MCCAIN: So's your Mom's face!

HILARY: WTF you guys. Why am I playing the cleric?

MCCAIN: Hilary, we've been over this.

HILARY: No, dude. I am so sick of being the girlfriend healer. Seriously, I can't even use a sword. Fuck this noise.

KUCINICH: IM A BARD

OBAMA: That's nice.

KUCINICH: MY FAMILIAR IS A PURPLE SNOW LEOPARD

MCCAIN: Oh, Jesus. Here we go.

KUCINICH: DID I MENTION MY WIFE IS A TOTALLY BANGIN DRYAD WITH 20 CHARISMA

HILARY: C'mon you guys, I've been playing this shit since Gygax was in eighth grade. Why can't I be the party leader with the magic sword for once?

Adventuring Party Politics: The Campaign is Getting Ugly (via Making Light)

(Image: My players Saturday morning, an Attribution-only Creative Commons licensed photo from Benimoto's Flickr stream)

The Electronic Frontier Foundation's posted a nifty Instructable video demonstrating the technique for spotting the secret spy-codes that many color laser-printers and copiers embed in their output. These dots were long-rumoured, but it wasn't until EFF discovered them that their existence was verified and their code was cracked. EFF's working on Freedom of Information Act requests to uncover which government agencies requested these dots, and what they do with them, but in the meantime, you can use the techniques in this video to spy on your friends and neighbours, just like the Feds! Yellow Dots of Mystery: Is Your Printer Spying on You? (via Make)

See also:
* Seeing Yellow: call your printer's manufacturer and ask why they spy on you
* EFF cracks hidden snitch codes in color laser prints
* Do forensic printer marks slow down printers?

I'm pretty chuffed to learn that Metaplace, a games startup that I'm an advisor to -- closed a new round of financing today, netting $6.7 million from their existing VCs and Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. Metaplace was started by Raph Koster, who created Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies, with the idea of democratizing the creation of virtual worlds and games inside them.

Instead of gigantic, elaborate virtual worlds, like Warcraft and its competitors, Metaplace allows users to create modest, personal virtual worlds the way you'd put together a MySpace page, using a toolkit that unpacks into a series of ever-more-powerful tools that allow greater and greater customization. Users can then link up their Metaplaces, stringing together their worlds to make bigger, more complex ones.

There's an invite-only beta, and Raph's promised to update his blog whenever new invites are made available. Raph's one of my favorite people in the world, and he's a profound thinker about games (see his book A Theory of Fun [free PDF] for more). I'm really excited to see Metaplace thriving, even in the current crummy economy. METAPLACE LANDS $6.7 MILLION IN FUNDING

Yesterday on Boing Boing Gadgets, we applauded Microsoft's attempts at creating an booze detecting bar countertop, and tested it with some rotgut served in Rob's tacky Pac-Man shot glass set. Our thirst for alcohol temporarily satisfied, we looked to slake our thirst for violence, and fell in love with a Mac vs. PC video that was one part West Side Story, one part Reservoir Dogs. A walking house was discovered, although it was slightly disappointing and nowhere near as arachnid-like as we'd all hoped. Beschizza liked an iPhone speaker system that looks like a Star Wars trash droid and a Bluetooth keyboard with "industrial anti-charm." Brownlee, meanwhile, liked an attractive watch with a futuristic occulus and a pair of color changing spectacles only David Pescovitz could ever get away with wearing. There was a stupendous set of home-made steampunk goggles and a wonderfully morbid hangman lamp. Google added WiFi geolocation to its services, and the Nintendo World Store has a hard drive Wii. And finally, at midnight, we turned out the lights and communed with the dead with an automated Ouija board. Link

Summer is over, and winter is just around the bend. If you plan on doing any diving, you better have a dry suit. That includes using dry gloves. This web site will show you how to make a pair for very little money.

My wetgloves have been slowly deteriorating, and are no longer keeping my hands as warm as they once were. Since I'm rocking my sweet NeoZ drysuit, I figured why not make some drygloves? Total cost was about $20. I may spend a little more and upgrade my liners, my hands got a little cold tonight, but the were dry!

Read more about making DIY Dry Gloves and Rings

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Dug North sent in this video of a Programmable Thumb Piano. I really like the heavy metal gear mechanism and the way you reconfigure the instrument. Check out Dug's site for more information. [Thanks Dug]

This machine uses a series of studded disks to pluck the tongues on an instrument resembling a thumb piano tilted on its side. As the notes to the video remark, by rearranging the disks, the Build-A-Tune offers a near-infinite combination of rhythmic sequences.....

More about Build-A-Tune: Programmable Thumb Piano

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I spotted this different take on a vertical-axis wind turbine at Maker Faire Austin last weekend:

I haven't found any further documentation on Rusty Forbes' design online, but the Makers' site claims this will work in winds from 5 to 90 miles per hour. Any takers to try and document building one? Also, check out these plans for a more traditional (but still bright green) turbine design.

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There's definitely been an ongoing battle in the video game world from some executives complaining about used game sales for console games (there's been a bit of confusion in the past tying this to video game DRM -- which is more focused on PC games). We noted that EA was among those concerned, but was hoping to give people more reasons to buy new, rather than second hand. However, some folks in the comments complained about the methods EA was using, and that's worth a further discussion, especially as other examples are being shown. Reader DEF points out that another video game company, Epic, is trying to encourage original purchases by giving buyers a free voucher for certain in-game items, such as special maps. Such vouchers would only work for the initial buyer, thus, in theory increasing the value of the initial purchase.

There are a couple of problems with this approach. While I do think it's better to come up with "reasons to buy" rather than trying to sue people or pass laws requiring a cut of the secondhand market, this approach may get it backwards. Effectively, they're selling "infinite goods" rather than scarce goods, and that seems likely to backfire, for a few reasons. First, it actually diminishes the value of the game. One aspect that buyers take into account is the resale market. An active second hand market increases how much people are willing to pay for the original product, because they recognize that they can sell it later.

Second, when the focus is on charging for infinite goods (or only promising them to those who buy first hand copies), the incentives get risky. Suddenly, gaming companies are put in a position of choosing what "virtual" items are allowed in the game for first hand buyers vs. second hand buyers, and that leads them to make bad decisions in locking up important aspects of a game, frustrating potential buyers.

Plenty of games have shown that money can be made in charging for the service (a scarce good) of connecting and accessing an online world or community. If video game makers focused on that, then the entire issue of the second hand market wouldn't be such an issue. In that case, they'd want to get the actual games distributed as widely as possible, with as many features enabled as possible, to make the idea of playing in the online environment even more appealing.

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What is 10' tall, has six hydraulic legs, and is powered by the wind and solar panels? The prototype pod house built by art collective N55 in Copenhagen, Denmark. With the help of MIT, N55 built the pod over a two-year period at a cost of £30,000. Designers say it provides a solution to the problem of rising water levels as the house can simply walk away from floods. One of the designers says, "This house is not just for travellers but also for anyone interested in a more general way of nomadic living." It won't be long now until the Japanese make Howl's Moving Castle.

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Cheeto4493 writes in -

I took the schematic and theory of a MiniPOV2 and adapted it to make a hat for Halloween. It is basically the same circuit as a MiniPOV2 but with a few different components to make it fit the hat better. As usual, I never take the time to document things as I'm building them. I'm just too excited to get the project built. So what you'll see is a retrospect of what I did, and some changes in what I would do again.

More:

Mini-POV kit! The 3rd generation MiniPOV is perfect for beginners who are looking to learn how to solder, how to program microcontrollers, or make LED blinky toys. Because the programmer is built into the kit, you don't need a special "microcontroller programmer". This version can be used with PCs (Linux/Unix or Windows) and Macs (running MacOS X and with a USB/serial converter).

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With our guy way up in the polls, and less than two weeks to go, it's starting to feel pretty real right about now. Most Americans seem to understand how important this election is.

As usual there's 40 percent who are sure to vote one way and 40 percent who are sure to vote the other, and the decision will be made by the 20 percent who could go either way.

Me, I'm in the 20 percent. Sometimes I vote Republican, sometimes Democratic. About half the time I vote for the winner and half the time I vote for the loser. I'm no Missouri or Ohio, I'm far from a bellweather, more like a coin flip. So if you support Obama, don't take any comfort in the fact that I do too.

Now the campaigns start to focus on making sure their supporters actually go to the polls. If they do, it seems our guy is a shoe-in. But there's a nagging doubt in everyone who's voting for Obama, remembering the Gore-Bush election and Florida, where thousands of votes were "supressed" which is a fancy word for "thrown in the trash."

Sad fact: If the Republicans hadn't been so good at throwing out Democratic votes, Gore would have won Florida and would have won the election.

In 2000 our democracy walked up to the abyss and barely came back. I can't watch this election unravel over corruption, not this time. And not while there's still time to do something about it.

I'm just beginning to understand what's being done to prevent voter suppression. Apparently there's a huge effort here in California to organize lawyers to make them available to people across the country. If you've been asked to accept a provisional ballot (someone is challenging your right to vote), these people will help. I barely understand what's being done. But I'm going to find out what we can do if we feel we are being disenfranchised.

Salon: Where the GOP could get dirty.

I will have a hard time accepting McCain as President, should he win. But if he does, there must not be the slightest chance that the election was won fraudulently. That would not put us in a very good place here in the US and around the world.

The Hill: Police prepare for unrest.

Boing Boing Gadgets colleague and Vice President of Photoshoppery Rob Beschizza says,

Brits older than maybe 20 or so will doubtless remember the general election of 1997, which saw Tony Blair — then a young center-left liberal running on a platform of change — defeat incumbent conservatives with a tarnished reputation.

The parallels with 2008's presidential race go beyond just a similar placement of pieces on the board, though: by the end, Blair's opponents were reduced to running personal attacks on Blair that make the McCain-Palin's recent larks looks like a vicar's tea party. They were incredibly bizarre.

Check out these campaign posters (above). They actually ran these on billboards, in newspapers and other media!

I was feeling a little sorry for the Republicans, given the thrashing they're about to be dealt. Perhaps this sort of thing will work a little better on this side of the Atlantic? (below).

Perroquet, a project inspired by science photography and nature documentaries, from fashion photographer Sølve Sundsbø.

Conventional fashion photography allows the image-maker to draw on a wealth of outside creative resources -be it a hair-stylist, make-up artist, or fashion stylist - to enable them to realise their intentions. In Parroquet, the subject matter encouraged Sundsbø to take a somewhat different approach, focusing on one specific element: the movement of the bird in flight.

It was always Sundsbø’s chief intention to document the parroquet using photography and film; both mediums enabling him to steal moments that would normally be missed. Shot in a controlled studio environment using high-speed cameras, the slow-motion shorts show the bird mid-flight. The distinct physical characteristics of the parroquet –its strong curved bill, and its clawed feet– are all visible, but it is the bird’s feathers that are the central focus.

Sundsbø also gives special consideration to the bird’s slender silhouette, by cleverly incorporating shots of its shadow.

The photographs present ‘frozen moments’ of the bird’s journey; rather than showing its full body, the cropped viewpoints bring abstract qualities to Sundsbø’s powerful images.

(ShowStudio, via Clayton Cubitt)

Hey, remember how Anil Dash overanalyzed LOLcats and sucked all the fun out of a perfectly vapid internet meme? Well, the internet killjoy has done it again, this time with last night's epic Yo Momma Intergalactic Political Smackdown, which took place on The Twitter. Read last night's Boing Boing post first, then dive in to Anil's post-game analysis. Snip:

While this is all in good fun, what's startling to me is that none of the jokes I've seen mention, or even allude to, race. Playing the dozens is a uniquely and explicitly African American tradition, and we obviously have an African American candidate favored in the race for the first time ever, and yet it hasn't come up.

Some of this, of course, is selection bias due to the audience that Twitter reaches. (At least so far.) But as these jokes from last night are already making their way around online as email forwards and apparently getting quoted in offices across the country, it seems to me like the playfulness of the language and the absurdity of the medium may have masked something timely and fitting. This obviously and instrinsically black tradition has been adopted by a community like Twitter that is, frankly, disproportionately not black. You could see it as the deracination of the tradition, or even worse as a deliberate omission of cultural context in its appropriation. But I actually see it as something positive.

A running joke on Twitter is all in good fun, but I find the unselfconsciousness of this little political gag to be a comforting reflection of the way that the larger trend around this election is moving as well. Like Barack Obama, playing the dozens is obviously black but we're able to just include that implicitly in our participation without having denying or diminish it. That feels like progress.

Yo Mama's So Fat... (dashes.com). You really should read all the way to the last graf in his post. I'm not gonna blog any spoilers here.

Smart and insightful, and one of a million reasons I love Anil Dash. Even if his momma's a ho.

This is why we have the internet. If you feel moved to sneer, *you* try re-creating a Beyoncé video, shot by shot, shimmy by shimmy, while clad only in asymmetrical underwear. Single Man Dances To Single Ladies. BB reader BettyWu reminds us that not everyone has seen the original, which is required: Single Ladies (Put A Ring On It). And other commenters wisely ask: is this the real Mango? And: do the original and the fan-remake not look awesomer when played side by side simultaneously? Whoah. (Thanks, Susannah Breslin)

We've been hearing about broadband over powerlines (BPL) for over a decade, supposedly as the savior of broadband competition. There was just one problem: the technology never worked well enough to scale in any reasonable means. In the mid-90s, we had heard a prediction that BPL could only work in very small communities, and only at a limited range and speed. Yet, over the years, there were so many stories about BPL actually making headway in the market, we began to wonder if maybe (just maybe) someone had figured out how to make it scale. It turns out the answer is no. Despite being labeled the "great broadband hope" by former FCC boss Michael Powell, BPL has been nothing but a great broadband joke from the beginning, never getting more than 5,000 subscribers. Now, Broadband Reports that one of the highest profile BPL rollouts is soon to be shut down. The company that built the network and hyped it for years tried to sell it off, and having failed to find any actual buyers, had the city take it over. The city considered just shutting it down immediately, but has agreed to keep it going for a year or so, when it will likely be turned off for good.

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Buzzfeed points to "leaked promotional material from Sarah Palin's upcoming ad council campaign." Don't miss the video referenced there, either. (Thanks Richard Metzger, via)

iandoh writes "Stanford researchers have found that voters are subconsciously swayed by candidates who share their facial features. In three experiments, researchers at the Virtual Human Interaction Lab worked with cheap, easy-to-use computer software to morph pictures of about 600 test subjects with photos of politicians. And they kept coming up with the same results: For the would-be voters who weren't very familiar with the candidates or in perfect lockstep with their positions or political parties, the facial similarity was enough to clinch their votes."

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I would like to use Huffduffer. I want my username to be ___________ and I want my password to be __________ . My email address is __________. By the way, my name is __________ and my website is __________ .

#

Simple package tracker that uses Google Maps to show progress (via @greghoyboy). #

Normally MIG welding requires a big fancy machine, sometimes also with a large tank of pressurized gas. Instructables user TimAnderson managed to hack together a hand-held wirefeed MIG welding gun and a couple car batteries for a more portable effect. He writes:

Here's my new wire-feed (MIG) welder.
All of it.
They sell these things as accessories for commercial MIG units, but they can also work great on 24 volts from two car batteries.
I have it loaded with .030" flux-core welding wire.
It cost me less than $100 on ebay.
The "Ready Welder" is a similar commercial product.
WARNING: The tip is electrically on all the time!

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There was an interesting article recently in the NY Times about various patients who had physical problems misdiagnosed due to a bad MRI scan. Apparently, a number of people continued to suffer from very serious problems for many months, until they finally returned and had another (better) MRI done, which found the problem the first one missed. It's certainly no secret that an MRI (or a technician reading the output of an MRI) might miss something, but it's interesting to see people whose natural inclination is to simply trust that initial ruling. We still have this infatuation with the idea that the machines are always right, so if an MRI says there's no break, it must be true. At some point, though, we need to kick that habit, and recognize that the output of such machines is also fallible, at times.

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There was an interesting article recently in the NY Times about various patients who had physical problems misdiagnosed due to a bad MRI scan. Apparently, a number of people continued to suffer from very serious problems for many months, until they finally returned and had another (better) MRI done, which found the problem the first one missed. It's certainly no secret that an MRI (or a technician reading the output of an MRI) might miss something, but it's interesting to see people whose natural inclination is to simply trust that initial ruling. We still have this infatuation with the idea that the machines are always right, so if an MRI says there's no break, it must be true. At some point, though, we need to kick that habit, and recognize that the output of such machines is also fallible, at times.

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One of the highlights of the Faire for me was seeing Steve Davee's work-in-progress Maker's Notebook hacks. He's adding a binary page indexing system with a conductive bookmark and LEDs on the cover that tell you where the marker is in the book. He also has plans to solarize the book and to add an Arduino and capacitive touch to the cover to do something (play sounds, maybe).

He says he has trouble following through on projects, so Steve, if you're reading this: follow through! We'll send you more Notebooks if you finish this one, document it, and send us the docs. This is just the type of project we were hoping to inspire with the book. We want more of this!

If YOU have a physical computing/electronics hack of your notebook, or any sort of mod, send us pics. We want to see what folks are doing with their notebooks. Also: If you've designed a cool project IN your notebook, we'd like to see how people are actually using the book.

In the Maker Shed:

 
Pick up The Maker's Notebook ($19.99) for all your big ideas, diagrams, patterns, etc. Exclusive to the Maker Shed: Sticker sheets and a band closure to customize your book.

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notthatwillsmith writes "Earlier this month, the most technologically-advanced digital planetarium in the world opened in San Francisco's California Academy of Sciences. The new Morrison Planetarium's 75-foot screen replaces the traditional Zeiss projector with an array of 6 high-resolution DLP projectors arrayed around the edge of the theater, which are powered by three very different, but interesting computing clusters. The three clusters allow for projection of traditional planetarium shows, playback of ultra-high resolution movies, and display of anything from current atmospheric conditions on Earth to a (greatly accelerated) trip to the farthest reaches of the universe, all rendered in real-time on an 8800 sq. ft. dome. Maximum PC went on a behind the scenes tour with the engineers who built the systems that do everything from run the planetarium lights to the sound systems to the tech behind the screen to show you how it works and what it's like to drive, well... the universe."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

notthatwillsmith writes "Earlier this month, the most technologically-advanced digital planetarium in the world opened in San Francisco's California Academy of Sciences. The new Morrison Planetarium's 75-foot screen replaces the traditional Zeiss projector with an array of 6 high-resolution DLP projectors arrayed around the edge of the theater, which are powered by three very different, but interesting computing clusters. The three clusters allow for projection of traditional planetarium shows, playback of ultra-high resolution movies, and display of anything from current atmospheric conditions on Earth to a (greatly accelerated) trip to the farthest reaches of the universe, all rendered in real-time on an 8800 sq. ft. dome. Maximum PC went on a behind the scenes tour with the engineers who built the systems that do everything from run the planetarium lights to the sound systems to the tech behind the screen to show you how it works and what it's like to drive, well... the universe."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

notthatwillsmith writes "Earlier this month, the most technologically-advanced digital planetarium in the world opened in San Francisco's California Academy of Sciences. The new Morrison Planetarium's 75-foot screen replaces the traditional Zeiss projector with an array of 6 high-resolution DLP projectors arrayed around the edge of the theater, which are powered by three very different, but interesting computing clusters. The three clusters allow for projection of traditional planetarium shows, playback of ultra-high resolution movies, and display of anything from current atmospheric conditions on Earth to a (greatly accelerated) trip to the farthest reaches of the universe, all rendered in real-time on an 8800 sq. ft. dome. Maximum PC went on a behind the scenes tour with the engineers who built the systems that do everything from run the planetarium lights to the sound systems to the tech behind the screen to show you how it works and what it's like to drive, well... the universe."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Spotted at Maker Faire, Peter Stanley's electric tall bike may be my favorite vehicle of any kind:

You can't tell from the video that there's no throttle: just an on-off switch. Because adding a motor to a tallbike wasn't dangerous enough;)

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UCLA physicists demonstrated that if you pull off a piece of Scotch tape inside a vacuum chamber, the tape releases enough X-rays to image bones through skin. Grad student Juan Escobar and his colleagues managed to make an X-ray of a thumb using the technique. (Composite image, including the thumb X-ray, below.) Apparently, Russian scientists reported fifty years ago that the act of peeling sticking tape can emit X-rays, but the new research confirms the early results. The latest experiments are presented in this week's issue of the journal Nature. From Nature News:

"At some point we were a little bit scared," says Juan Escobar, a member of the research team. But he and his co-workers soon realized that the X-rays were only emitted when the kit was used in a vacuum. "We don't want to scare people from using Scotch tape in everyday life," Escobar adds.

This kind of energy release — known as triboluminescence and seen in the form of light — occurs whenever a solid (often a crystal) is crushed, rubbed or scratched. It is a long-known, if somewhat mysterious, phenomenon, seen by Francis Bacon in 1605. He noticed that scratching a lump of sugar caused it to give off light.

The leading explanation posits that when a crystal is crushed or split, the process separates opposite charges. When these charges are neutralized, they release a burst of energy in the form of light.

Sticky tape generates X-rays(Thanks, Bob Pescovitz!)