k33l0r writes "Recently I've been thinking about developing (or learning to develop) for Linux. I'm a IT university student but my degree program focuses almost exclusively on Microsoft tools (Visual Studio, C#, ASP.NET, etc.) which is why I would like to expand my repertoire on my own. Personally I'm quite comfortable in a Linux environment, but have never programmed for it. Over the years I've developed a healthy fear of everything Java and I'm not too sure of what I think of Python's use of indentation to delimit blocks. The question that remains is, what language and tools should I be using?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

George Reese writes "It seems a lot of people are mistaking the very valuable benefit that cloud computing enables — dynamically scaling your infrastructure — with the potentially dangerous ability to scale your infrastructure automatically in real-time based on actual demand. An O'Reilly blog entry discusses why auto-scaling is not as cool a feature as you might think."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "The RIAA's 'Prince of Darkness,' Washington DC lawyer Matthew Jan Oppenheim of The Oppenheim Group, who controls and supervises all of the RIAA litigations against ordinary folks, has requested permission to intervene in the 'probable cause' hearing scheduled next week in Raleigh, North Carolina, against MediaSentry. The hearing was convened by North Carolina's Private Protective Services Board, after complaints were filed by a law firm representing a number of North Carolina State University students who had been targeted by the RIAA based on the unlicensed 'investigation' conducted by SafeNet (the new name for MediaSentry). I guess the RIAA is worried. They should be."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

coondoggie writes in to let us know about a fraud alert issued by the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center, warning that an unspecified bug in unspecified versions of Asterisk IP PBX software could allow criminals to generate "thousands of vishing telephone calls to consumers within one hour." PC World checked with Digium, developer of Asterisk, and found some puzzlement as to what bug the FBI had in mind. "In March, researchers at Mu Security reported a bug that could allow an attacker to take control of an Asterisk system. Digium wasn't certain what vulnerability the FBI was referencing in its advisory. However John Todd, the company's Asterisk open-source community director, believes that it was probably this March bug. That vulnerability 'basically allowed you to take over the account of one individual,' he said. ... However, the attack described by the FBI would be extremely hard to pull off, Todd said."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

rrohbeck was one of several readers to note the passing of Forrest J. Ackerman at the age of 92. Ackerman, who coined the term sci-fi in 1954, has been called the 'world's biggest fan.' Over a long career he acted as literary agent for Isaac Asimov, A.E. van Vogt, Hugo Gernsback, and L. Ron Hubbard; he published Ray Bradbury's first short story in a fan magazine in 1938. Ackerman wrote over 2,000 articles and short stories, including, oddly enough, lesbian fiction in the 1940s. In recent years mounting health bills forced him to sell his home, the 'Ackermansion,' and most of the 300,000 items of memorabilia it stored.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Dust off your tape player and join/start an Unsilent Night event in your town. From creator Phil Kline:

Every year since 1992 I've presented UNSILENT NIGHT, an outdoor ambient music piece for an infinite number of boomboxes. It's like a Christmas caroling party except that we don't sing, but rather carry the music, each of us playing a separate track that is a "voice" in the piece. In effect, we become a city-block-long sound system!

Join us and bring a boombox, or anything that will blast a cassette, CD or Mp3. (Cassettes sound the coolest, but we realize cassette players are getting scarce now.) The more tracks we play, the bigger and more amazing the sound is. In recent years, UNSILENT NIGHTs in New York and San Francisco have attracted crowds of over a thousand people, with hundreds of boomboxes... it's spectacular. If you'd like to participate, please e-mail the contact listed for your city for instructions. If you'd like to participate but don't have a boombox or a music player with speakers, you can just show up and join the parade. Everyone is an important part of the procession. Help us make a BIG (and joyful) noise. This is always a free event and all ages are welcome.

Dates vary depending on location; learn more here.

Here are photos from previous year's events around the world:

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As the price of oil has fallen from its dramatic highs of just a few months, ago, I often find myself thinking back to an essay by Yegor Gaidar, an economist and acting prime minister of Russia from 1991 to 1994. The essay, The Soviet Collapse, is subtitled "Grain and Oil" and tells the story of the end of the Soviet Union as the interaction of the price of those two goods.

The Soviet Collapse starts with the history of centrally-managed grain production, an unmitigated but slow-motion disaster, which they then proceeded to patch by importing grain with the budget surplus from rising oil prices, starting in the 1970s. That worked for a while, and then it stopped working.

The timeline of the collapse of the Soviet Union can be traced to September 13, 1985. On this date, Sheikh Ahmed Zaki Yamani, the minister of oil of Saudi Arabia, declared that the monarchy had decided to alter its oil policy radically. The Saudis stopped protecting oil prices, and Saudi Arabia quickly regained its share in the world market. During the next six months, oil production in Saudi Arabia increased fourfold, while oil prices collapsed by approximately the same amount in real terms.

As a result, the Soviet Union lost approximately $20 billion per year, money without which the country simply could not survive. The Soviet leadership was confronted with a difficult decision on how to adjust. [...] the Soviet leadership decided to adopt a policy of effectively disregarding the problem in hopes that it would somehow wither away. Instead of implementing actual reforms, the Soviet Union started to borrow money from abroad while its international credit rating was still strong. It borrowed heavily from 1985 to 1988, but in 1989 the Soviet economy stalled completely.

For an economics essay filled with price and output charts, it's a surprisingly gripping read. It's also a reminder of what's at stake now. Because oil consumption matters more than production to English-speaking countries, our press often covers the price of oil as a question of how often people drive to the mall. For countries like Russia, however, now as much as then, the price of oil has profound existential ramifications. Re-reading this, I got a picture of how geo-politically dramatic 2009 could turn out to be.

The Soviet Collapse: Grain and Oil

John Burek points out an article written by Stan Veit, former editor-in-chief of Computer Shopper magazine, and one of the first retailers to deal with the fledgling Apple Computer in the late 1970s. Veit describes his introduction to the Apple I and his early interactions with Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak as they developed their early models. Quoting: "After Woz hooked his haywire rig up to the living-room TV, he turned it on, and there on the screen I saw a crude Breakout game in full color! Now I was really amazed. This was much better than the crude color graphics from the Cromemco Dazzler. ... 'How do you like that?' said Jobs, smiling. 'We're going to dump the Apple I and only work on the Apple II.' 'Steve,' I said, 'if you do that you will never sell another computer. You promised BASIC for the Apple I, and most dealers haven't sold the boards they bought from you. If you come out with an improved Model II they will be stuck. Put it on the back burner until you deliver on your promises.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Mauricio emailed me a link to his latest project, the Rover AA1. It's a robot powered by an Arduino and a laptop. Check out the website for more information, including the Arduino and Processing code. [Thanks Mau!]

This idea and had thought for several months, since it figured it would be a practical way to make a robot. And yes it was. Not what he had done so because it first wanted to do with my normal laptop (Vaio K-13) but was a bit complicated because the laptop weighs about 3.5 kg. it represented what a lot of weight to move it with Tamiya. Until they finally got the chance to have an Acer Aspire NETBOOK One, and by its size and weight was perfect for the project.

More about Rover AA1 [Translated]

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Raul654 writes "The German Federal Archive has agreed to donate 100,000 images to Wikipedia under the German version of the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike License. These pictures cover a period from 1860 to present. This is the largest picture donation ever to Wikipedia, and possibly the largest in the history of the free culture movement." Apparently, this is part of a project which will eventually make 11 million photos available for public use.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Anti-Globalism sends in this quote from Scientific American about attempts to synthesize molecules that function as well or better than the natural building blocks of life: "A molecule that some researchers study in pursuit of this vision is peptide nucleic acid (PNA), which mimics the information-storing features of DNA and RNA but is built on a proteinlike backbone that is simpler and sturdier than their sugar-phosphate backbones. ... Many studies have demonstrated PNA's suitability for modifying gene expression, mostly in molecular test-tube experiments and in cell cultures. Studies in animals have begun, as has research on ways to transform PNA into drugs that can readily enter a person's cells from the bloodstream. ... Some scientists have suggested that PNAs or a very similar molecule may have formed the basis of an early kind of life at a time before proteins, DNA and RNA had evolved. Perhaps rather than creating novel life, artificial-life researchers will be re-creating our earliest ancestors."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Idzuna writes "With the somewhat recent announcement of Tabula Rasa shutting down, I have been thinking about what will happen to the Server/Client code. Does it get used as a guide for other projects? Does it get destroyed? Or does it just sit there on a hard drive somewhere in storage? The same question applies to many other failed creations. I know the likelihood of the code being distributed freely is next to nil, as most companies probably recycle code. If a vulnerability was found in old code, it could be applied to other products that the company has released. But wouldn't it help development of different projects if such a resource was available?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Matt_dk points out an update on the progress of development for NASA's Ares I launch rocket, excerpting: "NASA is using powerful computers and software programs to design the rocket that will carry crew and cargo to space after the space shuttle retires. But those computers will have their work checked the old-fashioned way with the first of several uncrewed demonstration launches beginning in 2009. Ares I-X, the first Ares I test rocket, will lift off from Kennedy Space Center, Fla. in the summer of 2009. It will climb about 25 miles in a two-minute powered test of Ares I first stage performance and its first stage separation and parachute recovery system." Reader coondoggie notes that NASA is also looking further afield, putting out the call for ideas on moon colonization. They'll be offering a variety of grants for projects which facilitate human activities that are "not reliant on Earth's resources."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

pumpkinpuss writes "The US military yesterday shot down a missile in a test simulating a long-range ballistic missile attack by a potential adversary such as North Korea or Iran. The target missile was launched from Kodiak Island, Alaska, at 3:04 PM Eastern time, tracked simultaneously by several ground and ship-based radars, and intercepted by a 'kill vehicle' 3,000 kilometers away over the Pacific 25 minutes later, according to the Missile Defense Agency. Lt. Gen. Patrick O'Reilly said, 'The kill vehicle was sent to a very accurate spot in space giving us great confidence.'" Reader gilgsn points out the testing of a different "multiple kill vehicle" by Lockheed Martin, which was able to hover over the ground and track a target. Video of the test (WMV) is also available.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

TorrentFreak has posted some statistics on the most pirated games of the past year. Leading the list by a large margin is Spore, made infamous even before its release for the draconian DRM attached to the game. It was downloaded through BitTorrent roughly 1.7 million times, with The Sims 2 and Assassin's Creed following at just over a million each. (It's worth noting that Spore came out in September, so that figure is essentially for a mere three months.) GameSetWatch has posted a related piece discussing the countermeasures involved in dealing with piracy. It's the second article in a series about piracy; we discussed the first a couple days ago.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Obsolete Technology Website has a gallery of 100+ obsolete computers. Lovely.

Welcome to the Obsolete Technology Website (via Beyond the Beyond)

A paper in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience describes a study that concludes that poor children aged 9 and 10 are likely to have lowered brain activity, comparable to a stroke victim. The researchers say that it's due to growing up in a stressful, "resource poor" environment, with "fewer books, less reading, fewer games, fewer visits to museums." However, the effects can be remediated through playing stimulating games.

"When paying attention to the triangles, the prefrontal cortex helps you process the visual stimuli better. And the prefrontal cortex is even more involved in detecting novelty, like the unexpected photographs," he said. But in both cases, "the low socioeconomic kids were not detecting or processing the visual stimuli as well. They were not getting that extra boost from the prefrontal cortex."

"These kids have no neural damage, no prenatal exposure to drugs and alcohol, no neurological damage," Kishiyama said. "Yet, the prefrontal cortex is not functioning as efficiently as it should be. This difference may manifest itself in problem solving and school performance."

Poor Children's Brain Activity Resembles That Of Stroke Victims, EEG Shows

Tor.com's Bridget McGovern sums up my anxiety at the thought of Alex Cox and David Lynch making a sequel to Repo Man called Repo Chick, "set against the background of the credit crunch."

I don’t know. I’m nervous, but also kind of excited to see what Cox comes up with. My biggest question, though, is about the soundtrack: how can the sequel even attempt to match the original in terms of music, when it remains one of my favorite soundtracks of all time? Iggy Pop, Suicidal Tendencies, Black Flag, The Plugz, and The Circle Jerks...the music is the heart and soul of Repo Man, and perfectly captured the essence of the gritty Los Angeles punkdom of the time. Not that there’s not a ton of great music out there, but what really compares nowadays? At least Iggy’s still out there rocking, same as he ever was, but it will be interesting to see who else will help Cox fuel his anarchic punk vision all over again...

Here’s Hoping Alex Cox’s Repo Man Sequel Isn’t One Big Circle Jerk

The CU Edible Book fesitval celebrates my three favourite things: literacy, food and horrible puns. Check out the Lard of the Rings, featured here!

The Library at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 3rd Annual C-U Edible Book Festival (Thanks, 7-how-7!)

The Internet Archive's public domain audio archive has dozens of vintage radio dramas from the Columbia Workshop -- everything from Shakespeare to Moby-Dick to "The History of the US Patent System".

Columbia Workshop at the Internet Archive, Columbia Workshop on Wikipedia (Thanks, Claude!)

The Chaos Communication Congress, held later this month in Berlin, will feature Open Attendee Meta-Data (OpenAMD) RFID badges that will track attendees' every movement, simulating life in the high-tech totalitarian state that many of the world's "free" nations are busy erecting.

Growing from the success of the OpenAMD Project at The Last HOPE in New York City this past summer, the CCC will be joining forces with SocioPatterns.org to add a real time proximity detection system so users can know what other users are nearby. In addition, users can log into a web interface that will suggest talks they might like and other attendees with similar interests. With this system, attendees will be able to see where they've been, what they've been doing, and with whom.

The OpenAMD system will be using several visual effects to display this, including an AJAX visual accessible from the conference website and a 3-D visual based on cutting edge graphics technology. This year will also introduce "Beacon Royale", an RFID-based game spanning the whole building where participants engage in virtual combat against each other. The system is completely open source, open hardware, and all the tracking data will be made available to the public after the conference.

How will surveillance feel in ten years? (Thanks, Aestetix!)

Prague's sovkitsch (Commiepunk?) Museum of Communism has some funny e-card designs that combine Socialist Realism with snappy captions.

Museum of Communism: E-Cards (Thanks, Marilyn!)

Mrs. Eves writes-

A friend of mine recently ran this awesome type project.
When each person's assigned letter was hit, they had to
run, jump and stamp their inked up letter onto a 20m
ream of paper. I was there to take some pix. The best!

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Mrs. Eves writes-

A friend of mine recently ran this awesome type project.
When each person's assigned letter was hit, they had to
run, jump and stamp their inked up letter onto a 20m
ream of paper. I was there to take some pix. The best!

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

Join Molly de Vries and pick up some new holiday tricks with a green conscience. She shows us how to make a festive fabric garland from attractive scraps, then shows a furoshiki fabric gift wrapping technique. Molly is a sustainable textiles maven and creator of Ambatalia "The Fabric Society." Molly recently closed her retail shop in Mill Valley, CA, but you can find her on her blog and etsy shop. She's even working an underground shop in her home studio for by-appointment shopping, special resourcing, and custom work.

From the pages of CRAFT, Vol. 9:

"Furoshiki Fabric Folding," by Jimmy Ho, pgs 76-77. Preview the article in our Digital Edition.

Subscribe to CRAFT Magazine

Craftzine readers can now get $5 off a yearly subscription by entering the code MCRAFT. That's just $29.95 for 4 quarterly issues!

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

Join Molly de Vries and pick up some new holiday tricks with a green conscience. She shows us how to make a festive fabric garland from attractive scraps, then shows a furoshiki fabric gift wrapping technique. Molly is a sustainable textiles maven and creator of Ambatalia "The Fabric Society." Molly recently closed her retail shop in Mill Valley, CA, but you can find her on her blog and etsy shop. She's even working an underground shop in her home studio for by-appointment shopping, special resourcing, and custom work.

From the pages of CRAFT, Vol. 9:

"Furoshiki Fabric Folding," by Jimmy Ho, pgs 76-77. Preview the article in our Digital Edition.

Subscribe to CRAFT Magazine

Craftzine readers can now get $5 off a yearly subscription by entering the code MCRAFT. That's just $29.95 for 4 quarterly issues!

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Etsy user SusanKniffinDavidson's "Upsidedown Baby Head Bowl" does exactly what it says on the tin, and what's more, it has a vivid red glaze on the interior, as befits the inside of a head.

Upsidedown Baby Head Bowl (Thanks, Aag!)

Out of all the gadgets that James Bond has used over the past 40 years, he has never been given a laser weapon. While he was given an Omega Laser watch in GoldenEye and Die Another Day, he only used it to cut through the floor of a train and a section of ice. Sure he has been the target of lasers before like the scene in Goldfinger where he is nearly cut in half by one. But now it's his turn. Here is a real project that shows how a laser diode from an XBOX 360 HD DVD drive can be combined with Bond's Walther pistol in this Instructable.

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alphadogg sends this NetworkWorld story discussing the obstacles Clearwire will have to overcome to succeed, which begins: "Clearwire recently announced the completion of its Sprint Nextel transaction and the formation of the new Clearwire Corp. In addition, it received $3.2 billion from Comcast, Intel, Time Warner Cable, Google and Bright House Networks. As expected, Clearwire's conference call emphasized all the positive aspects of the deal. Namely, it owns lots of spectrum, is building an all-IP network that is 'open,' and will use fourth-generation (4G) mobile WiMAX technology (IEEE 802.16e). I'd love to see a nationwide 4G mobile network, but let's be clear about some of the challenges facing Clearwire, including cost, device and competitive ones."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Using the undocumented MPTVOutWindow class and iPod A/V cables, it's possible to program an iPhone to have television output. What's cool about this is that since the iPhone be both the game platform and a controller, since it contains Wiimote-like accelerometer features. Using the MPTVOutWindow class, the makers of Moto Chaser were able to tweak a bit of their code and hack together a demonstration of the iPhone's video-out capabilities in only an afternoon. iPhone hacker Erica Sadun has a writeup of the whole process, including some of the development challenges, over at Ars Technica:

When Morrison approached senior programmer Mark Levin, he had basically one set of instructions. "Make it work before lunch." Freeverse had very little time to allocate to putting together the demo. In the end, the entire development effort took about three hours. And, of that time, nearly half was taken up dealing with Xcode provisioning issues, not technical demands from the porting. In the end, they created several build profiles in Xcode including a TV build in addition to their standard Debug and Distribution builds.

The MPTVOutWindow class, though undocumented, is part of the standard iPhone libraries. Erica has posted class documentation and how to go about using MPTVOutWindow in place of the normal UIWindow. There's no telling if the API will be officially published, removed, or altered in upcoming Apple firmware releases, so keep that in mind and go make something awesome.

Hidden SDK features transform iPhone into TV gaming device
iPhone 2.2 SDK offers undocumented TV-out features
MPTVOutWindow Class Reference

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Jenny Lens is an LA based photographer who has taken thousands of great early punk rock photos. She is gearing up to release a Ramones photo eBook

Ramones First West Coast Tour, 1976, Highlights, V1, the first in a series of exciting, new photo eBooks from the Jenny Lens Punk Archive. The ONLY way you will see so many rare, large and groovy photos, most seen only by Jenny!

FREE 16 page book sample eBook download.

BUY NOW (or for more info)

HELP SAVE the Jenny Lens Punk Archive! Jenny's seminal, 1976-1980, LA-based punk photos have been published more than anyone on the West Coast for over 32 years. Her photos have been published more than ANY other photographer during that time frame in ALL the numerous major books published the past few years. Her photos are also in documentaries, magazine articles, CD/DVD packaging and more.

But there are thousands you've never seen! Photos which will make you laugh, cry, dance and more!

jamie points out an interesting story which started a few days ago, when a pair of students from the Netherlands released a Firefox add-on which integrated links to the Pirate Bay on Amazon product pages. Customers who had the add-on would see a large "Download 4 Free" button next to items which were also available on the Pirate Bay. The add-on quickly drew notice, and the creators were hit with a take-down notice and threats of litigation from Amazon. Now, the students have removed the add-on, and they are claiming an unusual defense: "'Pirates of the Amazon' was an artistic parody, part of our media research and education at the Media Design M.A. course at the Piet Zwart Institute of the Willem de Kooning Academy Hogeschool Rotterdam, the Netherlands. It was a practical experiment on interface design, information access and currently debated issues in media culture. We were surprised by the attentions and the strong reactions this project received. Ultimately, the value of the project lies in these reactions. It is a ready-made and social sculpture of contemporary internet user culture."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In the last few years, the world of hobby robotics has exploded. Driven by the plummeting prices and ubiquity of microcontrollers, servomotors, and other electronic and mechanical components, the growth in personal fabrication technologies, and the success of such commercial toy, hobby, and domestic robots as Lego Mindstorms, the Robosapien line, Japanese mini humanoids, and iRobot's cleaning machines, robots are finally becoming rather commonplace (if still only in niche domains). And, of course, the robot growth being seeded by these new technologies is watered by the Big Muddy of the Internet, with its rapid information and idea exchange. The next generation of engineers and industrial designers who'll build tomorrow's robots are growing up with Vex kits and Arduino microcontrollers in their hands today.

For our MAKE Robot Gift Guide, we've put together a sampling of robot-related offerings from the Maker Shed, as well as some other robots we fancy. If you give or get any of these bots for the holidays, or especially if you or your recipients, hack them, we'd love to hear about it.

Fully-Assembled Robots

i-Sobot
I was given one of these last holiday season to review. At the time, I was pretty impressed that TOMY was able to offer such a sophisticated mini-humanoid for the price (which was then around $250 street). Now, sadly, after a year, TOMY has decided to discontinue the product. But that means we can offer them in the Maker Shed for $106!. That's a very attractive price for a very hackable little robot, making it the perfect gift for any techno-tinkerer on your list. This 6 1/2"-tall humanoid uses 17 servomotors to somersault, stand on one leg, do push-ups, perform martial arts. It has 180 pre-programmed movements, responds to verbal commands, and performs up to 240 movements in sequence, allowing you to design countless routines, such as programming the device to say "hello," introduce himself, play an air guitar, bow to his audience, and say "good night." Using the included action chart as a guide, you simply enter the alphanumeric codes into the remote control and i-SOBOT reacts in earnest with acrobatics, verbal phrases, and greetings, or you can control his movements manually using the dual joysticks and trigger buttons on the remote. In voice recognition mode, the robot moves in response to ten verbal prompts, such as "Go forward" or "Back up," and acknowledges questions like "How are you?" with appropriate retorts. Ages 10+.

Price: $105.95.

Robots-Dreams.com has some links to i-SOBOT hacking-related resources here.

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Rovio Mobile Webcam
We've been fans of WowWee and their growing line of robots since the first Robosapien. Along with iRobot, WowWee has been pioneers in making robot technology commercially viable. To date, most of WowWee's product line has been robotic toys. So we were excited to see them offering a more practical robotic system -- Rovio, a Wifi-enabled mobile webcam you can control from any Web-enabled device over the internet. One of the first commercially-viable robot applications iRobot looked into was basically the same sort of webcam on a robot which would allow remote tele-presence. So, WowWee comes along with a really killer-looking three- (omni)wheeled, semi-autonomous bot you can control over the Web for under $300. It's a start, but Rovio is definitely still in beta. We've only had a day to mess with ours, but we've already encountered many of the problems early users have cited: poor camera performance, especially in middle-to-low lighting, poor audio on the mic, docking station problems, unreliable waypoint navigation, and other annoyances. Also, in an ironic turn-about, the Windows network set-up is pretty much plug 'n play, while the Mac set-up is a little gnarlier. So, we can't recommend Rovio if you're looking for a home/office mobile sentry (what the device is basically marketed as), but it has all sorts of great hacks potential and there's already an enthusiastic hacking community that's started figuring out how to extend capabilities, control it with the Wiimote, and other promising improvements. And we have to mention the design -- it's seriously cool and the glowing blue LED running lights make it look like something, well from that 21st century that hasn't actually happened yet. In the hands of a robot hacker, this is a really fun system with lots of potential. For everyone else, wait for the next version when WowWee will hopefully fix some of the significant problems.
Price: $299.99

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Wrex the Dawg
Meet Wrex, the first commercial "junkbot," or so he's been made to look. A dog that only Dr. Frankenstein could love, Wrex appears to have been cobbled together from discarded electronic and mechanical parts. He's a literal junkyard dog. His personality is also stitched together. He has various moods and needs, he can become incorrigible, and he will even go haywire and break down on occasion. His rolling jackpots eyes spin around and have symbols on them that display his moods and desires. He's a cross between Astro from The Jetsons, Scooby Doo, and codeHound (codeHound, you say? It's an early Net-culture thing. I'm old). Like a lot of these highly motorized toys, this thing eats batteries like they were Scooby snacks. The bot requires four Cs and two AAs, the remote takes three AAAs. And be careful getting Wrex out of the big, impressive box he comes in. It's a major undertaking, and cheap, easily-stripped screws are involved. All-in-all, this is an adorable, slightly screw-loose robo-pet that kids will definitely love (and your inebriated adult friends at holiday parties). I can't wait to see how he might get hacked.
Price: $119.99

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Guitar virtuoso Joe Satriani has sued Coldplay for copyright infringement over claims that their hit single, Viva La Vida, used "substantial original portions" of his song If I Could Fly from 2004, seeking damages for "any and all profits." The lawsuit has been filed in Los Angeles federal court. Call me a skeptic, but it was just back in June when we wrote about a band called Creaky Boards making a similar claim. The difference is that the Creaky Boards didn't sue. They made a cheeky video and used the opportunity to get some attention (also, later retracting the statement after Coldplay refuted it). However, one notable difference here is that Coldplay was very unlikely to have heard the Creaky Boards song, while Joe Satriani is well known, especially among guitarists. When you listen to this clip, the melodies are certainly very similar:
But does that mean it was copied? Most people's knee-jerk reaction is to assume it must have been, but here's an idea: Creaky Boards, Coldplay and Joe Satriani all have a similar melody over a similar chord sequence. When Coldplay responded to Creaky Boards, Chris Martin called it a "simple coincidence." Is it not plausible that it's just a somewhat natural melody to sing over those chords? You can't copyright a chord sequence. If you search YouTube for these sorts of claims, you quickly realize that a lot of songs sound the same. Some cases are blatant infringement, but for most, there are only so many notes in a scale...

Chris Martin has said: "We're definitely good, but I don't think you can say we're that original. I regard us as being incredibly good plagiarists." I bet he wishes he hadn't said that now, but to what extent is that true about all of our ideas? Isn't a certain element of "plagiarism" a natural part of the creative process? Where's the line between plagiarism and inspiration? Of course, trying to pass someone's work off as your own is bad because it's dishonest and you aren't giving proper credit, and your reputation will likely suffer for it if someone finds out. But even if Coldplay did get the melody from Satriani (whether consciously or unconsciously), how much damage have they done? If you listen to the theme of Satriani's song and the verse of Coldplay's, the melodies are very similar, but the songs in their entirety are very different. Coldplay takes the song in a completely different direction in the chorus, while that melody is Satriani's chorus. Coldplay's song has lyrics, Satriani's is instrumental. They appeal to different audiences, they're very different songs. Even if it is an case of infringement, how significant is it?

That's saying little about the legal realities though. It's bound to be a sticky issue in court. Coldplay will likely claim independent creation to try and clear their name (unless they did blatantly rip it off, in which case they might look for a settlement). How do you prove whether or not someone came up with a melody independently? How many notes or rhythms need to be similar to prove that one melody is a derivative of another? This is going to be an interesting case to watch.

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

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NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "After learning that Professor Nesson's CyberLaw class at Harvard Law School has set up a Facebook page to assist in its defense of Joel Tenenbaum in an RIAA case, SONY BMG Music v. Tenenbaum, Wendy Davis of the Online Daily Examiner opines that 'Web 2.0,' and more particularly, the 'social media,' are playing an increasingly important role in RIAA litigation. We at Slashdot have already learned that principle, and have made good use of it, as have our friends at Groklaw."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It never really made sense for EA to be so insistent on having draconian DRM on games. Before the company even launched Spore people made it quite clear the plan would backfire, but EA went forward with it anyway, creating a PR nightmare. And all for what? Turns out (not surprisingly) the DRM didn't do squat to stop unauthorized file sharing. Spore has now been declared the most downloaded video game of the year. And, even though the year's not over, no other game is going to catch up. And, it's worth noting, the game only launched in October, so this is only over a couple of months. In other words, EA's "antipiracy strategy" backfired almost completely. The company got a huge PR blackeye which probably only encouraged more people to download the game via file sharing. Can someone explain, again, why any company thinks DRM works?

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It's almost time for the year end holidays but there's one last bit of Halloween business to take care, the DIY Halloween contest winners! It took awhile to get through all these, there were HUNDREDS --- Drum roll:::::::::::::::::

Tech Grand Prize
The Magic Mirror - Arduino Powered

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Craft Grand Prize
Aliens Powerloader Halloween Costume

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Check out the rest of the winners and congrats to the winning entries!

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I dig this classic Sesame Street animation of a Rube Goldberg Machine with an alphabet theme.

Just a warning if you live in British Columbia: you might not want to express your opinion out loud, ever. Even if you're at home. Jon R writes in with a somewhat horrifying story of a man in British Columbia who has been found guilty of defamation for a private conversation he was goaded into, at home, which was secretly recorded. Defamation laws (for libel and slander) were designed to stop the public presentment of false information, traditionally through some sort of media property. It certainly was never intended to be used for the random comments made privately at home.

In this case, a developer was annoyed that residents in one of the developments where he owned the water and sewage rights were complaining about the way he operated. So, he hired a private detective to pretend to be a potential homebuyer in the neighborhood. The detective knocked on the door of Jack and Judy Aasen and asked about the neighborhood. They, being friendly people, invited him in and had a nice discussion with him, pointing out that they liked the neighborhood very much, and the "only problem" was dealing with the guy who owned the utility, Brad Chapman, who was about to tear up their yard and cut back on their sewage service. The Aasens were upset that they had no choice to switch to another provider and that they had no say in stopping their lawn from being torn up. Jack jokingly referred to Chapman as "a prick" and said he "kind of makes the suggestion that he's got the mayor in his pocket." During this conversation with a guy they thought was just a friendly potential new neighbor, the detective was actually recording the whole thing.

Aasen and three others got charged with defamation for this, and the amazing thing is that the court agreed -- specifically on the comment about the mayor being in his pocket. Even that seems pretty questionable, though, since Aasen never said the mayor was actually in the guy's pocket, only that Chapman himself "kind of makes the suggestion" of that. To then charge the guy with defamation for that statement seems like a huge stretch. But, much more troublesome is this idea that you could go into someone's home, misrepresenting yourself, secretly record the conversation while coaxing the people you're talking to to say something negative about someone else... and get them found guilty of defamation for it.

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molotovjester writes "In what is surely going to be a slap in the face of Apple, AT&T is eyeballing the Symbian platform as a smart-phone OS for an army of new handsets it expects will make up the majority of the market by 2014. Is this move too little, too late compared to Google's Android? Will Apple open up its iPhone platform, or will dreams of electric sheep be dreamed up by the majority of cell phone users? I wrote an analysis of the industry players as of mid-November, but it will be interesting to see what AT&T does and how it changes the mobile ecosystem."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I uploaded a red and green blinking pattern to my BlinkM programmable LED, hooked it up to some AA batteries, and shoved it up the reindeer's nose. (Well, technically into the back of his head.) My wife saw it hanging on the tree and said it looked more demonic than cute. Maybe that's because of the glowing eyes and hideous grin.

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Great background story on the Drawdio kit (we have this in the Maker Shed!)...

Imagine you could draw musical instruments on normal paper with any pencil (cheap circuit thumb-tacked on) and then play them with your finger. The Drawdio circuit-craft lets you MacGyver your everyday objects into musical instruments: paintbrushes, macaroni, trees, grandpa, even the kitchen sink...

One day I bought a "harmonium" kit at the street market in Bangalore. I hacksawed the keyboard off to make the first ever Drawdio circuit. We played with it at a local school in the slums using plants, water, our foreheads, etc. My friend told me graphite would work too. Meditating on it, I realized the Drawdio circuit should be literally attached to a pencil to "draw audio," and that's where the name came from: Draw + Audio.

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WFMU, the only radio station that matters, is holding an art exhibition to raise much needed funds for a new booster antenna in Manhattan.

There will be a lots of reasonably priced work from a really wide range of artists from the well known (Cindy Sherman, Mike Kelley & Richard Prince) to up and comers like Dan Funderburgh and Matthieu Gafsou. Much of the work is brand new and has been created especially for our show and is priced to sell.

We also have a website up where people can buy editions including very reasonably priced work by Chris Johanson and James Siena among others.

WFMU art exhibition

Today on Offworld, we looked at how the first pack of downloadable content for Mirror's Edge reminded us (happily) of the best bits of Super Mario Sunshine, went undercover to sneak ourselves out a copy of Japan's exclusive Resident Evil 5 demo, logged into Sackbook, the best new web project to come out of LittleBigPlanet, and went Mario Kart-ing in real life. We also prepared ourselves for a Metal Gear December Surprise, saw how LittleBigPlanet was invading music/puzzle game Lumines (later, in motion), and nosed around Sega's new Sonic-laden casual game portal. Finally, we looked at Trine, a forthcoming PC/PS3 game from Finnish developer Frozenbyte that looks to blend the best parts of Lost Vikings, Gauntlet and.. Crayon Physics, saw Obama going all Gears of War, and, most endearingly, rescued wayward beagles across procedurally generated landscapes.

prone2tech writes "From an article at Dr. Dobb's: Chipmakers have essentially said that the job of enforcing Moore's Law is now a software problem. They will concentrate on putting more and more cores on a die, and it's up to the software industry to recraft software to take advantage of the parallel-processing capabilities of the new chips. As is argued in this article, this means becoming proficient in parallel functional programming. The bad news? Getting good at functional programming is hard, harder than moving from iterative Pascal or Basic or C coding to object-oriented development. It's an exaggeration but a useful one: When you move to FP, all your algorithms break.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I really try to avoid reading the Progress & Freedom Foundation's intellectual property blog, because it just raises my blood pressure with a near constant stream of highly misleading arguments or just purely ridiculous claims. However, Tim Lee points out that Tom Sydnor is up to his usual tricks of taking some bit of news, twisting the context around completely, leaving out fairly important details and coming up with a conclusion that doesn't even add up from his own twisted reasoning. This time, it's about the recent story where a judge correctly dropped RIAA lawsuits against some Boston University students after the school noted that it could not identify who the alleged infringers were with certainty.

This set off quite the rant from Sydnor, who claims that this now means that BU's network is a "safe harbor" for "terrorists, pedophiles, phishing-scheme operators, hackers [and] identity thieves" by giving them a "get out of jail free" card. This is similar to those silly and easily disproved arguments from years ago that open WiFi would allow criminals to all get away with any online crimes they wanted.

This makes two faulty assumptions that Sydnor either knows and ignores, or is ignorant about (neither of these are good options). First, it assumes that all of those other activities wouldn't leave any other trail. That, of course, is ridiculous. Your network usage is hardly the only bit of information all of those other criminal uses leave. Second, it assumes that every person on a network is easy to identify. In fact, it's quite difficult to establish, with any degree of certainty, who a particular IP address belongs to. Thanks to a variety of different factors, an IP address is not at all a good identifier of who is doing something online. This has been one of our problems with lawsuits relying on such info. It's notoriously unreliable, leading to many bogus charges (collateral damage to supporters like Sydnor, apparently, but not to those of us who believe in actually having evidence before accusing someone of a crime). It also does not mean, as Sydnor claims, that BU network administrators are "incompetent." It just means they're honest.

But, rather than face up to any of those facts, Sydnor skips over them and goes for the emotional charge:

Perhaps the U.S. Departments of Justice and Homeland Security should explain the broader implications of this ruling to BU before clumsy efforts that coddle student piracy help get someone defrauded, molested, or killed. BU's IT Department might also consider the potential legal implications of acts that tend to conceal the identity of lawbreakers.

Yes, or perhaps anyone with a bit of common sense could explain to Sydnor how networks work and the difference between not being able to identify a user vs. "concealing the identity of a lawbreaker." Apparently, based on Sydnor's twisted reasoning here, any network operator who cannot identify each and every user on its network may be guilty of being an accessory to a crime. Sydnor, who rushes to point to legal precedents supposedly (though often not really) supporting his position at every opportunity, somehow misses out on the right to anonymity which has been established many times in court. But why let little things like facts and reality get in the way of claiming that a reasonable response from BU sysadmins is going to lead to a safe haven for terrorists and pedophiles and criminal charges against BU network operators?

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The Greener Gadgets 2009 design competition is now open for entries:

We invite designers to explore the concept of "Greener Gadgets." Designs should seek to minimize the environmental impact of consumer electronic devices at any stage in the product lifecycle. Areas of sustainability to consider include:

1. Energy
2. Materials / Lifecycle / Recycling
3. Social & Educational Development

Participants are encouraged to consider their designs as part of the entire product ecosystem, and should think as holistically as possible. Designers may choose to focus their entries on a particular area of human enterprise (learning, playing, communicating, etc.), or a particular context (work, home, school, etc.), a particular material, or a specific device. Entries may also seek to create new paradigms for products and services.

Ultimately, we are looking for "great gadgets" of the greener kind.

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Prizes

Grand Prize: US$3,000
Second Prize: US$1,000
Third Prize: US$1,000

Judging

Entries will be pre-judged by representatives from Core77 and Greener Gadgets. A set of 50 Semi-Finalists will be showcased at the Core77.com and GreenerGadgets.com websites for voting and commenting. A set of 10 Finalists will then be selected by the judges for final judging LIVE on stage at the Greener Gadgets Conference on February 27, 2009 in New York City. (Finalists are not required to be in attendance.) Winner and runners up will be determined at the event though a combination of on-stage judging panelists and live audience votes.

Entries will be judged on the following criteria: innovation, clarity of design, originality, form and presentation.

Enter and more information here. Here's a video of entries and judging last year:

One more reason for you to go design something to help save the world!

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Eric, of Instructables, has been doing some great promotion for The Best of Instructables. Here he is on ABC New Now's Ahead of the Curve.

He's also going to be on Good Morning America (ABC) tomorrow morning. The segment should be up on the website later in the day.

Go get 'em, Eric!

In the Maker Shed:

The Best of Instructables Volume I As we're sure you're well aware of by now, The Best of Instructables is available in the Maker Shed. 120+ projects chosen by the Instructables staff, MAKE editors, and the Instructables community. Price: $22.75

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