GalacticNoob writes "According to this post, Google is about to launch a TV advertising program that will let advertisers target audiences based on demographics including their household income. A satellite TV company called Echostar is working with credit-reporting company Equifax to cross-reference shows watched with income and buying habits (based on using Equifax's data)."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ahmed Kamal writes "What happens when you take a solid system such as Ubuntu Hardy, unplug its Linux kernel, and plug in a replacement OpenSolaris kernel? Then you marry Debian's apt-get to Solaris' zfs file-system? What you get is Nexenta Core Platform OS. Let's take Nexenta for a quick spin, installing and configuring this young but promising system."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

We stopped yesterday in the small town of Field, in Yoho National Park in British Columbia. It's the western side of the Continental Divide from where we were in Banff National Park. Here we are looking north from Field over the Kicking Horse River Valley.

Field, which has a picturesque setting beneath Mount Stephen, below, was built for the construction of the railway and it looks like a model train village today. Railway workers began uncovering unusual fossils in the area. Charles Walcott came in 1908 to explore the trilobite bed near Mount Stephen. A year later, nearly 100 years ago, he discovered the Burgess Shale, which he named after nearby Mount Burgess. Walcott, head of the Smithsonian Institution, spent many years excavating the fossils and returning them to his museum.

The Burgess Shale lies within Yoho National Park but you can only visit there in summer under the direction of licensed guides. We had a look-see in the information center and then headed to Calgary to fly home.

Years ago, I had read Stephen Jay Gould's Wonderful Life and the brief visit to Field made me want to find the book first thing upon returning home.

Gould writes that "the invertebrates of the Burgess Shale...are the world's most important animal fossils. Modern multicellular animals make their first uncontested appearance in the fossil record some 570 million years ago." These fossils represent a record of the Cambrian explosion and "they are precious because they preserve in exquisite detail...the soft anatomy of organisms."

Gould writes lyrically:

The animals of the Burgess Shale are holy objects -- in the unconventional sense that this word conveys in some cultures. We do not place them on pedestals and worship from afar. We climb mountains and dynamite hillsides to find them. We quarry them, split them, carve them, draw them, and dissect them, struggling to wrest their secrets. ... They are grubby little creatures of a sea floor 530 million years old, but we greet them with awe because they are the Old Ones, and they are trying to tell us something.

Since the book was first published in 1989, Gould's interpretation of the evolutionary significance of the Burgess Shale has come under some criticism. (You can read some of the criticism in Amazon's reviews of the book.) Also, other Cambrian fossil sites have been found in Greenland and China. However, you can't mistake Gould's true enthusiasm for the story of the Burgess Shale, and its breakthrough role in helping us understand the history of life on earth.

CWmike writes "Microsoft asked a federal judge yesterday to end the class-action lawsuit that has been the source of a treasure trove of embarrassing insider e-mails covering everything from managers badmouthing Intel to others on who worried how Vista would be compared to Apple's Mac OS X in 2005. In seeking to end the case, Microsoft argues the plaintiffs have not demonstrated that the lowest-priced version of Windows Vista was not the 'real' Vista, or showed that users paid more for PCs prior to the new operating system's launch because of the Vista Capable campaign."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It's a little too late to join in on the fun of this online drum circle, but the video is really interesting. Hopefully they will have another session in the near future. I'll keep you all updated.

Telematic Drum Circle is an interdisciplinary art project which combines Tele-Robotics, Computer Science, Pneumatics and Music. The project explores the rupture of deeper communication in the technology meditated world, and addresses the issue of global harmony by sharing participants' rhythmical spirit produced through the telematic live drum ensemble. It consists of two main components: a set of sixteen robotic drums arranged in an installation space and an interactive website networked with these drums. Each drum is representative of a geo-cultural region.

More about the Telematic Drum Circle [Drum Instruments]

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CyberKnet writes "Some enterprising folks over at Google have collaborated via Google Documents to create holiday art using cells in a spreadsheet as the pixels. A time delay video was taken and is available over at YouTube and the result is pretty spectacular. More info on how they did this is available behind the scenes. They're inviting people to share their own masterpieces or post a video response over on YouTube."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

BTW, while I'm mentioning flames, of all the comments I got, publicly and privately on my bit about FreshAir, the vast majority didn't respond to the substance of my piece, proving once again that the Internet has no subtlety. You're either for me or against me, seems to be the attitude of most commenters. Well, I could be for you in some ways and not for you in others. I thought Gross did a competent, even admirable interview. I just thought it was gutless to do it with Ayers who had already been lambasted by the Repoobs.

I'd like to see her take a similar approach to one of the supposed heroes of Vietnam. I think Ayers was on the right side, even though his tactics were extreme. More to the point, I was on the same side as Ayers. Let's see her have the guts to get McCain on her show and question him the same way. Anything you care to apologize for about your role in Vietnam? Heh, it'll never happen.

It pains me no end that the summation of the history of Vietnam is that it was a just war, and the people who opposed it were wrong, and the ones who opposed it violently were terrorists. That view is sad, and lacks balance, and imho is clearly wrong. Ayers was a kid back then, that's why he did some kid-like things (like plan at first to fight in the war so he'd get material for a book). The history we're to believe is one-dimensional and dangerous cause it leads to more disasters, like the one in Iraq.

McCain can be forgiven for not learning all the lessons of Vietnam, he was in prison far away while the US was exploding. But then so can Ayers. Maybe that would be a good topic for Terry Gross to handle -- how do we forgive those who made mistakes in their opposition to an unjust war, if only for the pragmatic reason of not wanting to keep fighting the same war over and over for generation to generation.

One of the themes in the interview was that this last election was the last one where Vietnam will be an issue. At first I concurred, but on reflection I realized that because we didn't learn from the war, we'll keep going round in circles when we have to live with the wounds from Iraq. That hasn't come home yet, amazingly, but it will at some point be a big issue in our country, and we've already had elections that focused on it, and will continue to, probably, for a couple of generations.

Vietnam, therefore, is still very much with us.

If you had a time machine and could go back to the 70s and ask those where alive then if we'd repeat the mistakes of Vietnam, a wise person would likely say, yes, eventually, but this generation surely won't make them. And that wise person would have been wrong.

I need an app I can launch from a script that reliably shuts down Apache. Pretty sure I can relaunch it without too much trouble. I don't care what language as long as its an exe I can just run. I can try to debug a pair of batch scripts but that approach always takes a few hours for me.

I need to do it for a couple of reasons...

1. I want to change some of Apache's conf files and have the changes reflected.

2. I want to rollover the log files and have to do it when Apache is not running.

There may be some other reasons to want to temporarily shut down Apache under code control.

I posted a tweet about this and got back a ton of questions, so I realized that I'd better put up a blog post. With 13K-plus followers most of them can't see each other so my responses would make no sense to most of them, then I get questions asking me to explain what I'm responding to, and you can see this quickly cascades out of control (one of the reasons I say Twitter is no good for conversation, of course y'll all flame me for that one heh).

jerico.dev writes "I am currently selecting a CM tool for a project. Important condition: the software must be OSI compliant. I considered Alfresco, since they call themselves 'open source.' Then I heard from several of Alfresco's partners that they are not allowed to do projects based on Alfresco's GPL edition because their partnership contract denied them the right to do so. They only can support Alfresco's enterprise edition. But Alfresco's VP of business development Matt Asay told me that their enterprise edition is not OSI compliant. Does anyone in the Slashdot crowd have experience with partner contracts of other OSS vendors? Is it normal that Sun, Red Hat, etc. force their partners to decline projects based on their open source editions? It's probably legal to do so, but do you think it is legitimate and fair?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Bruce Sterling, sci-fi author / futurist / design critic extraordinaire, has posted his final Viridian note. He has lots of advice relevant for Makers. Some of my favorite:

Get excellent tools and appliances. Not a hundred bad, cheap, easy ones. Get the genuinely good ones. Work at it. Pay some attention here, do not neglect the issue by imagining yourself to be serenely "non-materialistic." There is nothing more "materialistic" than doing the same household job five times because your tools suck. Do not allow yourself to be trapped in time-sucking black holes of mechanical dysfunction. That is not civilized.

Now for a brief homily on tools and appliances of especial Viridian interest: the experimental ones. The world is full of complicated, time-sucking, partially-functional beta-rollout gizmos. Some are fun to mess with; fun in life is important. Others are whimsical; whimsy is okay. Eagerly collecting semifunctional gadgets because they are shiny-shiny, this activity is not the worst thing in the world. However, it can become a vice. If you are going to wrangle with unstable, poorly-defined, avant-garde tech objects, then you really need to wrangle them. Get good at doing it.

Good experiments are well-designed experiments. Real experiments need a theory. They need something to prove or disprove. Experiments need to be slotted into some larger context of research, and their results need to be communicated to other practitioners. That's what makes them true "experiments" instead of private fetishes.

If you're buying weird tech gizmos, you need to know what you are trying to prove by that. You also need to tell other people useful things about it. If you are truly experimenting, then you are doing something praiseworthy. You may be wasting some space and time, but you'll be saving space and time for others less adventurous. Good.

And, an exciting new project on which he can use your help:

This new effort of mine is a scholarly work exploring material culture, use-value, ethics, and the relationship between materiality and the imagination. However, since nobody's easily interested in that huge, grandiose topic, I'm disguising it as a nifty and attractive gadget book. I plan to call it "The User's Guide to Imaginary Gadgets."

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An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from the Hartford Courant: "Almost 18 months after a pornography conviction that could have sent her to jail for 40 years was thrown out, former Norwich substitute teacher Julie Amero plead guilty to a single charge of disorderly conduct Friday afternoon. The plea deal before Superior Court Judge Robert E. Young in Norwich ends a long-running drama that attracted attention from around the world. ... She had originally been charged with 10 counts of risk of injury to a minor and later convicted on four of them. ... In June of 2007, Judge Hillary B. Strackbein tossed out Amero's conviction on charges that she intentionally caused a stream of "pop-up" pornography on the computer in her classroom and allowed students to view it. Confronted with evidence compiled by forensic computer experts, Strackbein ordered a new trial, saying the conviction was based on 'erroneous' and 'false information.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Hugh Pickens writes "In the first such system deployed in the country, police vehicles in Ponca City, Oklahoma will have wireless video cameras installed so precinct dispatchers and supervisors can monitor activities during traffic stops in real time, and quickly deploy additional officers and resources if necessary. The system to provide an added level of monitoring and protection for its force is part of a broadband mesh network comprised of more than 490 wireless nodes and gateways connected to 120 miles of fiber backbone that will provide coverage for approximately 30 square miles of the city. The network will provide field communications for city services including police, fire and emergency, parks and recreation, public works and energy, but will also be used to provide free wireless internet access for all residents of the city. 'The testing of this network showed that it was robust enough to handle not only municipal traffic, but also citizens' traffic.' said Mayor Homer Nicholson. 'So the Ponca City Board of Commissioners voted to allow the extra internet access to be given to the citizens of Ponca City for free.' The second phase of the project will expand the network and wireless coverage to more than 430 square miles surrounding the city with an estimated annual cost savings of over $1 million for city residents, who can discontinue their existing internet service. 'Our goal is to be one of the most mobile communities in America, and this is a significant step in that direction,' said Nicholson."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Julie188 writes "Slow-moving ocean and river currents could be a new, reliable and affordable alternative energy source. A University of Michigan engineer, Michael Bernitsas, has made a machine that works like a fish to turn potentially destructive vibrations in fluid flows into clean, renewable power. This is is the first known device that could harness energy from most of the water currents around the globe because it works in flows moving slower than 2 knots (about 2.3 miles per hour). Most of the Earth's currents are slower than 3 knots. Turbines and water mills need an average of 5 or 6 knots to operate efficiently. Further details and a few brief movies of the technology are available, as well as a video explanation by Professor Bernitsas himself."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Lucas123 writes "The Clinton administration generated 32 million e-mails. Bush's administration has generated 50 times as much data — 140TB, 20TB of which is email — which soon will have to be archived through a new government-built records management system. The new system may not be up to the task because the technology behind it may not be able to handle the sheer volume of data along with the fact that the Bush administration has been slow in providing the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) with needed information about the records, according to a Computerworld story. Questions have also been raised about millions of missing e-mails from between March 2003 and October 2006. 'It wasn't until this summer that an intensive effort began to share information,' said Ken Thibodeau, director of NARA's Electronic Records Archives."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Barence writes "Microsoft has confirmed that Internet Explorer 8 will not be officially released until 2009. According to a blog posting on the Internet Explorer 8 development site, a release candidate of the browser will be released in the first quarter of next year, to be followed by a final release at an unspecified date. This news comes on the same day that Google is considering bundling its Chrome browser with new PCs. Will the IE delay and Google's tactics help to steer users in Chrome's direction?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In an audacious new paper, "Homes With Tails," Tim Wu and Derek Slater argue that there's no good technical or economic reason why homeowners couldn't supply their own fiber-optic internet connections that run hundreds of times faster than today's connections:

We call this property model “Homes with Tails,” for the fiber would form part of the property right in the home. Key facets of our approach include:

1. A “condominium” model for fiber ownership, in which individual strands of fiber are sold to consumers, while maintenance and other collective needs are managed jointly.

2. Private firms and municipalities could consider selling fiber connections based on this model; and

3. Governments could consider using various mechanisms to support consumer purchases, including a tax credit to homeowners or renters who purchase a broadband connection.

Summary: Homes With Tails, PDF: Homes With Tails

Kurt sez, "Minuscule is a co-production of French national TV and the Disney channel. It's a combination of real world sets and CGI insects, sans dialog. Personally, I think the lack of dialog makes the creatures more humane, and adds incredible opportunities for visual humor. Few opportunities are missed, and few fail. There are episodes all over YouTube, and when those whet your appetite, please buy the DVD and support these comedic geniuses." (Thanks, Kurt!)

Jim sez, "A handful of Sailors on my ship, the USS Shiloh (CG 67) which is based out of Japan, recently made a 26-minute Star Wars fan film. 'Star Wars Episode 67: The Seeds of Betrayal' is a story of two Sailors who handle a misunderstanding the only reasonable way...by having a saber fight throughout and around the ship. It took them about 5 months to shoot and edit, and I'm pretty sure it's the first Star Wars fan film to be shot on a US Naval warship, while she's underway."

US Navy Sailors make Star Wars fan film on their ship (Thanks, Jim!)

circletimessquare brings us an update to the status of the million-dollar Netflix competition to develop a better algorithm for movie recommendations. We've discussed aspects of the competition since it started two years ago, but the New York Times has a lengthy overview of where it stands now. "The Netflix competition is still going strong, with a vibrant, competitive roster of some 30,000 programmers around the globe hard at work trying to win the prize. The Times provides a look at some of the more obsessive searchers, such as Len Bertoni, a semi-retired computer scientist near Pittsburgh who logs 20 hours a week on the problem, oftentimes with the help of his children. There's also Martin Chabbert in Montreal: 'After the kids are asleep and I've packed the lunches for school, I come down at 9 in the evening and work until 11 or 12.' The article gets into the history of the search algorithm Netflix currently uses, and explores the hot commodity called 'singular value decomposition' that serves as the basis for most of the algorithms in competition."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Never burn your mouth on a hot drink again...

No matter your poison -- coffee, tea, hot chocolate, sake -- take a gulp too soon out of the pot and chances are good that you'll burn your mouth. But build this Smart Coaster and you'll always know when it's safe to sip.

According to my thermometer, common coffee brewers produce a cup of perfect coffee that is positively molten to the tongue, at 71ºC. Even as this marvelous beverage fills your room-temperature cup, temps can still reach a blistering 58ºC. Finally, after a couple of minutes cooling, your coffee is safe to drink, at a lukewarm 47ºC.

A simple circuit consisting of a thermistor, a special low-power operational amplifier (op amp) IC, an LED, and a couple of passive components will enable us to safely monitor the temperature of our coffee cup. Bundle this circuit inside a round metal container (metal helps conduct the cup's heat to the circuit) and you have a Smart Coaster.

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Download the MP4 Video or HD Version | Subscribe to CRAFT in iTunes | mov | 3g2

I caught up with craftzine blogger and Austin local Rachel Hobson at Maker Faire Austin 2008, where she gave a demo on making the Mini Monsters from CRAFT:06. These fun little creatures, invented by Moxie, are unique and full of the personality you give them. This is a very kid-friendly project, and you can buy the Mini Monster Kit in the Maker Shed. Don't forget that all craft kits are 10% off until the end of November using promo code CRAFTER.

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Perspectives, interviews with all the dialog removed via Waxy.

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holy_calamity writes "Some grainy black and white movies are receiving rave reviews from scientists. They are taken by a new microscope which, thanks to a 'strobing' electron gun, can image movement at sub-nanometer scales. Until now, only still images that smeared out movement were possible at such scales. The press release notes, 'The researchers first blasted the sample with a pulse of heat. The heated carbon atoms began to vibrate in a random, nonsynchronized fashion. Over time, however, the oscillations of the individual atoms became synchronized as different modes of the material locked in phase, emerging to become a heartbeat-like "drumming."' Further details and a few animations are available at Caltech's site."

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Ian Lesnet sent in a link to his Bus Pirate project, a universal bus adapter that lets you interface with most standard integrated circuit serial protocols at different voltages - all from you PC's serial port. The idea is that you can debug, test, and prototype ideas a lot faster if you don't have to breadboard an interface circuit every time you work with a new chip.

the bus pirate is a serial terminal bridge to multiple ic interface protocols. we type commands into a serial terminal on the computer. the commands go to the bus pirate through the pc serial port. the bus pirate talks to a microchip in the proper protocol, and returns the results to the pc.

all pins output 3.3volts, but are 5volt tolerant. on-board 3.3volt and 5volt power supplies are available to power the connected chip. software configurable i2c pull-up resistors complete the package.

the serial terminal interface works with any system: pc, mac, linux, palm pilots, wince devices, etc; no crapware required. we considered a usb device, but usb isn't compatible with the huge number of hand-held devices that have a serial port. we also wanted a 3.3volt device with 5volt tolerant inputs, but most popular through-hole usb microcontollers were 5volt parts (e.g. the pic18fx550).

The device supports i2c, spi, uart/serial, and raw 2-wire and 3-wire. It looks like a pretty handy little tool, and Ian has included all the information you need to build one of your own.

The Bus Pirate

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An anonymous reader writes "The Register reports that BT, the UK's dominant telecom and internet service provider, has 'banned all future discussion of Phorm and its "WebWise" targeted advertising product on its customer forums, and deleted all past threads about the controversy dating back to February.' Phorm is a controversial opt-out system for delivering targeted advertising that intercepts traffic passing through an ISP in order to profile subscribers via an assigned unique ID based on their online activities. Subscribers can opt-out at the Webwise website but are opted-in again if the Phorm cookie is cleared. Firefox users can install Melvin Sage's Firephorm add-on to manage their interaction with Phorm and Webwise."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

We've been among those who think that the government shouldn't be forcing cable providers to offer a la carte channels. While people always insist that if they got a la carte cable, it would be cheaper, the facts are quite different. The economics of providing a la carte through existing systems would greatly increase overhead, and make it difficult to make things work. Most people would end up paying the same or more -- but for fewer channels. Those who are complaining might be better off recognizing that when they pay for cable they're effectively just paying for what they want -- and the other channels are freebies.

Or, they can just realize that a la carte TV is coming without the need for government interference. Adam Thierer notes that there's a growing movement of folks realizing that you can get an awful lot of television programming (legally) online these days. It's reaching the point where we're finally moving towards a world that we predicted years ago that shows are independent of channels or TV providers, and you can just get them directly online. That's already leading some people to ditch TV service entirely, knowing they can get plenty of shows they want online -- and all of this is happening without the government getting involved at all. So, can anyone explain why it still makes sense for the government to get involved here?

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NCSoft announced today that it will be closing down Tabula Rasa on February 28th. The sci-fi shooter-flavored MMO struggled for quite some time, despite recent attempts to draw in new players by announcements of new features, price reductions, and using Richard Garriott's trip into space as a promotion. We discussed Garriott's departure from NCSoft a couple weeks ago. This is NCSoft's second failed MMO, and apparently layoffs are in the works. They seem to be making an effort to make the game's last few months as fun as they can for their remaining players, though. "Before we end the service, we'll make Tabula Rasa servers free to play starting on January 10, 2009. We can assure you that through the next couple of months we'll be doing some really fun things in Tabula Rasa, and we plan to make staying on a little longer worth your while."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

We've seen plenty of organizations react poorly and sue when someone creates a parody of what they do. Parody is protected under fair use rules, but that doesn't always stop lawsuits. And, some were apparently wondering if Cooking Mama, a popular video game for Nintendo platforms would get offended and sue over a critical video from PETA. Cooking Mama is apparently a game where you simulate preparing a meal. The PETA version used artwork from the original game and created Cooking Mama: Mama Kills Animals, with the rather overt position. Some had thought that the company behind the game, Majesco, might sue. But, Jeff Leyser points out, the company took the high road, responding to the parody game and essentially said "thanks for the free publicity," while noting that the game has options for vegetarian meals.

"Food lover and culinary cutie Cooking Mama is a virtual chef who believes that good home cooked food, properly prepared from the best ingredients, can bring people together around the table and make the world a happier place. That's why Mama is taking a stand with oven mitts raised high against the latest PETA objection targeting her freshly released videogame, Cooking Mama World Kitchen, that shipped this week for Wii from Majesco Entertainment Company. Mama wants people to know that World Kitchen includes 51 recipes from around the world, ranging from vegetarian fare like miso soup and rice cakes to international delicacies like ginger pork and octopus dumplings."

See? It's not that difficult to respond without resorting to a lawsuit.

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Michael Moore was a recent guest on Larry King talking about the auto bailout. Moore's terrific documentary, "Roger & Me," targeted the auto companies in 1989 while they closed plants and laid off workers. Moore tells Larry King that in the movie when the GM representative said that 30,000 people could be laid off in Flint, he thought it was a joke. Years later, it came true. Moore says he's conflicted, as many of us are, about what to do. He doesn't have any confidence in the leaders of this industry.

Moore doesn't want to see the loss of more jobs in the US auto industry. He also doesn't trust the current management teams that got them into this mess. Hard to argue against either position.

I don't know if I can go so far as Moore to believe that the government could do a better job running these companies. However, it's clear that this manufacturing capacity could be a great asset if applied to an overhaul of the US transportation system.

Embedded video from CNN Video

I liked Michael Moore as the bumbling everyman in Roger & Me and I've liked his movies less and less as they've become strident setups. I was happy to see Moore in this interview get back to something like his old self. It's somehow personal again.

Since this interview, the CEOs of the Big Three had a humbling day on Capitol Hill, unable to defend their use of separate corporate jets to bring them to the hearing and more importantly, unable to articulate what they would do with the money they're asking for. They've supposedly gone back to Detroit to work on a proposal and muster the courage to go back to Washington in December.

Eric J. Wilhelm, of Instructables, will be on NPR's "Weekend Edition Saturday" and WCBS-AM 880 this coming Monday to talk about The Best of Instructables for a holiday gift-themed program.

The airtime for "Weekend Edition Saturday" will vary by market. The WCBS-AM program will air on 11/24 at 10:20 am, 11:40 am, 12:20pm, 1:40 pm, and 2:20 pm (all times ET). You can listen to it live at http://www.wcbs880.com/

Also, you can log onto NPR.org/gifts at 1:30pm ET tomorrow for a live chat featuring Eric talking about ECO-nomical holiday gifts!

Best Of Instructables Instructables.com has become one of the most popular magnets for makers and DIY enthusiasts of all stripes. Now, with more than 10,000 projects to choose from, the Instructables staff, the editors of MAKE magazine, and the Instructables community itself have put together a collection of some of the best craft and tech how-to's from the site. The Best of Instructables Volume 1 includes plenty of clear, full-color photos, complete step-by-step instructions, and tips, tricks, and new build techniques you won't find anywhere else. Over 300 pages and 120 projects!

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If you've been reading my blog you know I'm a big fan of the Fresh Air podcast, have been for a long time, since before it was a podcast. I like the way the host Terry Gross interviews people, and because the show is so good, and she's basically a fair interviewer, and a lot of people listen to it, she gets very good, very interesting guests. All around, a lot of positive flow around the show, and I'm a fan. Or I should say I was a fan until three days ago, since then I've not been able to listen to the show, I'm so disillusioned with Ms Gross. Let me explain.

First, what happened three days ago was she interviewed William Ayers, the man made famous by the McCain-Palin campaign as the supposed terrorist who President-elect Obama "palled-around" with. Here's an MP3 of the interview. Before you judge my judgement, listen to the whole thing. It's necessary to get a full appreciation of what I'm going to say.

In this interview, she used the tough "gotcha" style interview, every question designed to evoke a confession. Ayers answered each question like a skilled politician, and walked a very fine line, and held back a lot of things I'm sure he would have liked to say.

In the end she asked Ayers if he wanted to apologize for what he did, if he would be willing to take the "unrepentent" part off the label "unrepentent terrorist," and he refused, and I'm glad he did.

These are complicated issues, and to deal with it in a balanced way would require probably a few books, written from different perspectives. We don't today have a balanced view of the struggle in the US over Vietnam. Not when one person is singled out this way, when so many others are responsible for so much more death and destruction.

The reason I like FreshAir is she doesn't normally do gotcha. Her style is to ask leading questions to get her subjects to tell their own stories. She may ask challenging questions, but only ones her subject wants to answer. Since the Ayers interview she's returned to her original style, interviewing a comedian and a book author. But I can't help but wonder if each of these people has something to answer for too, and she's not asking about any of that.

I definitely sympathize with Ayers, I probably wouldn't have minded if she probed John McCain this way about his involvement in Vietnam. I'm sure he killed a lot more people than Ayers did. And that led me to the other, larger reason I'm unhappy with the interview -- she might not want someday to have someone say she "palled around" with an unrepentent terrorist who attacked his own country. In other words, she may be using us to protect herself. If that's the reason she drove Ayers so hard, I would much rather she had skipped the interview altogether.

After all we've heard about him that's bad, didn't he deserve one chance to tell his story without being presumed guilty? And didn't we deserve a chance to hear that? FreshAir is the place I would have thought we would have gotten that story, and I think there's a good chance that cowardice prevented it. It certainly appears that way, and in journalism, it's hard to respect someone who allows such an appearance to persist.

It's going to be real hard for her to keep me as a fan. Either she adopts the gotcha style and goes after everyone, from clowns to reporters, and I'll tune out for the same reasons I don't listen to other reporters who use that style; or she stays with the softball style I like, but I'll never be able to stop thinking of her as a hypocrite for being so gutless with Ayers.

During the presidential campaign, we noted that singer Jackson Browne had sued the McCain campaign for the use of one of his songs in a commercial. The McCain campaign has filed a response to the lawsuit, first noting that it wasn't the McCain campaign that used the song in an ad, but the Republican Party of Ohio. Second, the campaign points out that the use of the song probably qualifies as fair use:

"Given the political, non-commercial, public interest and transformative nature of the use of a long-ago published song, the miniscule amount used and the lack of any effect on the market for the song (other than perhaps to increase sales of the song), these claims are barred by the fair use doctrine."

Of course, between this and the McCain campaign's attempt to get YouTube to apply different fair use rules to presidential campaign videos, it makes you wonder if Senator McCain will actually try to do something in the Senate to improve copyright law to make fair use more explicit and make it clear that it covers these sorts of actions. Somehow I doubt it.

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gpronger writes "The ATIC (Advanced Thin Ionization Calorimeter) has potentially discovered the presence of dark matter close (only 3000 light-years) to our solar system. The system detected a large amount of high energy cosmic rays which match the theoretical signature of dark matter annihilating itself. The universe is believed to be composed of about 25% dark matter, but there has been little evidence of it. This discovery, if correct, would be the first." The paper was published in Nature, but it requires a subscription to see beyond the abstract.

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Papervision - Augmented Reality (extended) from dpinteractive on Vimeo.

I tried it out and it was very impressed by the speed and accuracy of the motion tracking (he did flicker a bit and have problems when my lights were too bright, so be prepared to work a bit to make him happy). This is a Flash implementation of augmented reality created by Digital Pictures Interactive; all it takes is your web browser, a webcam, and a printed marker symbol. Now, would it kill the little guy to smile every once in a while?!

It seems to be based on the ARToolKit developed by Dr. Hirokazu Kato of the University of Washington.

I enjoy Augmented Reality much more than Virtual Reality because 99% of the AR environment is the real world in all of its infinitely detailed glory and I can accept a few lower fidelity objects overlaid here and there. Even the highest quality VR worlds still feel much less than real in a way that usually pulls me out of the experience.

via BoingBoing Offworld

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Online-music rental services -- where users get access to a library of songs for as long as they pay a monthly fee -- keep hanging around, despite little apparent interest in them. In an attempt to breathe some life into its subscription service, called Zune Pass, Microsoft is now giving subscribers 10 songs they can permanently keep per month. The company says its research shows that more consumers might consider subscription services at current pricing levels if they got "to take something with them." But isn't that just saying consumers prefer to buy music, rather than rent it? Rentals work for one-time-use items like movies and books, but for things like songs, which people tend to listen to multiple times, subscriptions aren't attractive. The argument that subscriptions are good for discovery doesn't really hold water, either, given the proliferation of online services that let users listen to huge libraries of music for free. One other angle to this news: why would anybody purchase digital content from Microsoft after the PlaysForSure fiasco, in which it shut off its DRM servers, making it impossible to transfer PlaysForSure-"protected" content to any new devices, rendering it largely useless?

Carlo Longino is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Carlo Longino and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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ruphus13 writes "In an effort to take on IE and make strong headway in its share of the browser market, Google is taking a page out of Microsoft's playbook and working on deals with PC OEMs to include Chrome in their devices. From the article: '[Google] is likely to pursue deals with major original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) to put Chrome on their computers and devices. ... If Mozilla could get aggressive about this too, we could see Internet Explorer facing more serious competition than ever. ... Google, much more so than Mozilla, has enough global brand recognition, money, and savvy to make a big deal of this. ... Microsoft wooed Dell, Compaq, HP, Gateway, Acer and many other companies into making its browser the default choice on Windows desktops. Chrome currently has just under one percent market share, according to NetApplications. That number could rise significantly through this effort. Mozilla doesn't have the kind of money required to get the significant deals in this space, but Google definitely does.'"

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Mary Lou Jepsen with XO Laptop, via Inhabitat

GREENER GADGETS 2009

WHAT: The Second Annual Greener Gadgets Conference is a revolutionary event and exhibition promoting the importance of environmental stewardship in consumer technology innovation. This one day conference brings together electronics industry leaders, entrepreneurs, journalists and designers to address key green topics including sustainable design and lifestyles, product marketing, energy efficiency and more.

The event also will feature the Greener Gadgets Design Competition, an awards program to recognize forward thinking and eco-conscious designers for their hard work, environmental awareness and creativity.

Greener Gadgets offers an excellent platform for environmental discussion and serves as an opportunity to visualize the potential for a greener CE industry.

WHEN: Friday, February 27, 2009

WHERE: McGraw-Hill Conference Center, New York, NY

No speakers announced yet, but "Last year's keynoters included electronics engineer Mary Lou Jepsen of PixelQi and One Laptop Per Child, environmental photo artist Chris Jordan, and digital artist and inventor Natalie Jeremijenko."

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