These Chinese architecture stamps look like they'd be a lot of fun for decorative and design projects. Unfortunately, they're sold out at the distributor. Got another source for them? Post it to the comments, below. "This stamp set recapitulates the elements of chinese traditional architecture, such as ridge of a roof, lintel of door and ridge animal."

chinese architecture stamps (via Cribcandy)

The Demo/Design Clinic store on Etsy features these new Kozo lamps made from plumbing fixtures. Handsome, functional, and heavy -- just how I like my furnishings.

Kozo3 lamps (via Dvice)

Karate Sid writes "An Irish adult website has blogged about the Irish domain registry banning adult domain names, including porn.ie and pornography.ie. The IEDR's reasoning is that the words 'porn' and 'pornography' are offensive and immoral. Of interest is how Sex.ie took legal action against the IEDR — and proved that neither word is offensive — yet still lost the case, as the IEDR are the highest authority in Ireland when it comes to deciding what is and isn't an offensive domain."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Electronic Arts has released a de-activation tool for removing the SecuRom digital rights management that the company earlier deployed on several of its games. SecuROM is known as the most Draconian DRM tool for games, apt to screw u your computer and harm your ability to play the games you bought. It's also entirely ineffective against piracy: Spore, the SecuROM-crippled game released to much fanfare in 2008, was also the most pirated game of 2008. It seems like the decision was driven by the massive, global negative publicity that SecuROM attracted, and by the rumblings from the FTC about regulating DRM.

Electronic Arts has posted a SecuROM de-authorization management tool. Once downloaded, the tool will search your drives for EA games infested with the draconian online DRM system, and help you download their respective individual de-activation tools. This isn't a perfect solution, since it's still possible to run out of activations in the event of hardware failure or other source of data loss, but since the announcement that this particular DRM system will be dropped for The Sims 3 , it would seem that EA has had a minor epiphany about DRM.

EA Releases DRM License Deactivation Tool

It had seemed like perhaps The Guardian newspaper in the UK understood how the internet worked. After all, execs there had been saying that they hoped the NYTimes would start charging, since it would just drive a lot more traffic their way. However, it seems like not everyone at The Guardian is on the same page. Similar to Feargal Sharkey's call demand that the UK government investigate Google for not giving the recording industry money, The Guardian is now asking the UK government to investigate Google over its Google News product, specifically claiming that Google gets too much benefit from its content. Of course, there's a simple solution to this: take your news off of Google News (or take it offline altogether). But The Guardian doesn't want to do that.

The reasoning is a bit convoluted, but, basically The Guardian says that since the online ad market is tough right now, it can't make enough money on the traffic that Google sends it. So stop accepting traffic from Google, right? No, it can't do that, because then competitors like the BBC would sweep up all of the traffic.

Is it just me, or does this reasoning suggest that The Guardian should be asking the government not to investigate Google News, but the BBC for representing unfair competition? The Guardian's reasoning here is a bit tortured. It seems to be saying it can't compete with other sources due to Google News... even though those other sources have the exact same issue (getting traffic from Google News). It's only real complaint is that the BBC offers its content for free online -- and (though it doesn't appear to explicitly call this out), the BBC is publicly funded and doesn't have to focus on ad revenue like The Guardian does. So why isn't the complaint against the BBC instead of Google News?

The Guardian always struck me as a pretty good paper, but the logic here is hard to understand. If it doesn't want the traffic, fine, don't take it (though, most people recognize that would be a mistake). If the problem is that it can't monetize the content effectively, then that's a business model problem for The Guardian -- not Google News. Finally, if the problem is (as it appears) competition from the BBC, then take it up with the BBC or those who fund it, but don't misplace the blame on Google News.

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LateNiteTV sends in news of a "kill pill" from LM Ericsson AB that a wireless carrier could use to remotely disable a subsidized netbook if the customer doesn't pay the monthly bill or cancels their credit card. "...the Swedish company that makes many of the modems that go into laptops announced Tuesday that its new modem will deal with [the nonpayment] issue by including a feature that's virtually a wireless repo man. If the carrier has the stomach to do so, it can send a signal that completely disables the computer, making it impossible to turn on. ... Laptop makers that use Ericsson modules include LG Electronics Inc., Dell Inc., Toshiba Corp., and Lenovo." The feature could also be used to lock thieves out of the data on a stolen laptop.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Tomorrow is a milestone -- it was on April 1, 1997 that a weblog called Scripting News first appeared at www.scripting.com. It wasn't my first blog, it was the continuation of a stream of writing that began in October 1994. And it doesn't really matter what day it started, because there is a continuing thread that ties it all together. It began with how to romance developers, and how Apple wasn't doing it, and how the leaders of the software industry were missing the big opportunities presented by the Internet. Today not much has changed. Silicon Valley still doesn't understand how its products are used, and doesn't do nearly all it should to be sure its interests are aligned with its users' interests.

But there are exceptions.

Today I got an email from Amazon that said something simple that almost everyone likes to hear: Thank you. It's something that Twitter never says. In fact they seem to go out of their way to chase off the people who helped them build their network into the powerhouse that it now is. Much the same way Apple, in 1994, before Jobs came back, was trying to chase off its developers. Every day Twitter does more to tip the table away from the individual and more toward the media industry. Right now there's not much the users can do because there aren't any realistic choices, but if there ever are any, I'm out of there so fast -- don't blink cause all you'll see is a tiny cloud of dust where I used to be.

Same way I got off Apple's platform as soon as I could.

And who knows, it could happen that Twitter wakes up before they have major competition and decides to do something to glue the users to them. But given the tradition of Silicon Valley of keeping its users at a great distance, I wouldn't bet on it.

A company that provides in-flight mobile phone service to some European airlines says it has logged 10,000 calls since its launch in December 2007. Those calls have passed without incident -- they don't seem to have interfered with ground networks, they haven't led to any terrorist attacks, they haven't messed with planes' electronics and caused any crashes. That pretty much covers the technical or safety reasons given for bans on in-flight calls in countries like the US, really leaving only the annoyance factor as justification for a ban. Surely, though, if safety isn't the issue, the choice should be left up to individual airlines: if calls really are so annoying that they become a problem, airlines can ban them on their own. If an individual flyer feels so bothered by the calls, they can choose to fly only on those airlines that don't allow them.

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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Following up on the "sexting" case we've discussed in recent days, oliphaunt sends word from the Times-Tribune that a New Jersey federal judge has ordered the prosecutor not to file charges in the cases of three teenage girls whose cell phones were confiscated. "Wyoming [NJ] County District Attorney George Skumanick Jr. cannot charge three teenage girls who appeared in photographs seminude traded by classmates last year, a judge ruled Monday. US District Judge James M. Munley granted a request by the American Civil Liberties Union to temporarily stop Mr. Skumanick from filing felony charges against the Tunkhannock Area School District students."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

If you're a bored journalist, it's easy to create a sensationalistic story about "piracy." Just find some pre-internet industry that's dealing with the shift to online content, get a few quotes about how awful "pirates" are, and then find a company to blame for all of it. That seems to be what the Times of London did with its story about publishers freaking out over people uploading books to Scribd. Scribd responded by pointing out numerous factual errors in the original article (specifically the parts that seem to try to place the blame on Scribd, despite it being a third party platform that actually has a pretty advanced anti-infringement system in place). However, this is the quote that struck me:

Peter Cox, a literary agent and editor of the Litopia blog, said: "These people are pirates. We don't have to give in to this. We can't afford to make the same mistakes the music industry did."

Apparently Mr. Cox hasn't been paying attention. The "music industry" (he means the recording industry) didn't give in on this. It fought it consistently. And lost pretty much every battle -- often making things worse for itself by simply never adjusting to the changing marketplace. So, Cox's response is to follow their exact mistakes by "fighting" this? That's exactly the mistake that the music industry made.

Instead, he might want to take a look at what folks like Paulo Coehlo discovered when he "pirated" his own books and saw sales jump. Or what Baen books has done. Or what tons of authors have found after they put their books online for free and combined it with a smart business model. Otherwise, Mr. Cox is making the exact mistake the recording industry made while thinking (incorrectly) that trying to "stop piracy" is somehow a workable solution.

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Thelasko writes "A NYTimes blog reports that the volume of spam has returned to is previous levels, as seen before the McColo was shut down. Here is the report on Google's enterprise blog. Adam Swidler, of Postini Services, says: 'It's unlikely we are going to see another event like McColo where taking out an ISP has that kind of dramatic impact on global spam volumes,' because the spammers' control systems are evolving. This is sad news for us all."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

KermodeBear writes in to note that according to Smashing Magazine, the newest version of Internet Explorer, codenamed "Eagle Eyes," supports Firefox plugins, the Gecko and Webkit rendering engines, and has scored a 71 / 100 on the Acid3 test. The article is pretty gee-whiz, and I don't entirely believe the claims that IE's JavaScript performance will trounce the others. (And note that the current Firefox, 3.0.8, scores 71 on Acid3, and Safari 3.1.2 hits 75.) No definitive date from Microsoft, but "sources" say that an IE 8.1 beta will be released in the summer.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

We've never been a fan of Ocean Tomo, the "patent auction" shop that was seen as something of a clearing house for lawyers and patent hoarders looking to buy up patents to squeeze money out of other companies. However, in February, we wrote about an article in the Chicago Tribune insisting that the tough economy was increasing patent sales as companies looked to squeeze more value out of their patent portfolios. We questioned the article, noting that it showed absolutely no proof whatsoever that sales were up -- other than a claim (with no data) from an Ocean Tomo exec, who had every incentive to make people believe that sales were up.

But, in reality, it turns out sales aren't up. They're way, way, way down.

Joe Mullin writes about the latest Ocean Tomo auction that can reasonably be termed a total disaster after sales didn't just fall, but fell off a cliff:

While some folks I spoke to before the auction said they expected sales this year to be down by as much as 50 percent from last year, the final results were much worse. Friday's auction took in just under $2.9 million--more than 80 percent less than the roughly $17 million in patent sales generated by the company's San Francisco auction last year.

Out of more than 80 lots of patents on the block, only six sold. (An Ocean Tomo auction "lot" can include a single patent, several patents, or a portfolio of patents in related technology.) Ocean Tomo tacks on a 10 percent fee paid by buyers, and also charges fees to sellers, meaning the company probably took in less than $1 million for itself....

Ocean Tomo CEO James Malackowski looked a bit shaken by the end of the day.

"Obviously the market has become more selective," he said in brief concluding remarks.

That, of course, is exactly the opposite of what Ocean Tomo was telling reporters just a few weeks ago (and those reporters repeated it without question).

In the meantime, Saul Hansell of the NY Times, notes that one of the very few buyers was RPX, a company we covered last year, which is still insisting that its business model is never to sue for infringement but to simply let tech companies "license" its portfolio as a way of having ammo against other patent infringement lawsuits. It's sort of "Intellectual Ventures-lite." This was the original business plan of IV, but no one really believes that IV won't eventually sue -- and I'd imagine the same is true of RPX. At some point, its A-list investors will demand a bigger return, and using the portfolio to sue will just be too tempting.

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Another Make: City group has formed, in Portland, OR. They'll be holding their first "official" meeting on April 5th, 3pm, at the local TechShop in Beaverton.

The last speaker is YOU. Bring your projects and show them off!

Please RSVP on Upcoming.org or Facebook

The MakePDX website has additional information including instructions to RSVP.

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Dr_Barnowl writes "Electronic Arts has posted a SecuROM de-authorization management tool. Once downloaded, the tool will search your drives for EA games infested with the draconian online DRM system, and help you download their respective individual de-activation tools. This isn't a perfect solution, since it's still possible to run out of activations in the event of hardware failure or other source of data loss, but since the announcement that this particular DRM system will be dropped for The Sims 3 , it would seem that EA has had a minor epiphany about DRM." I'm sure EA's hand was forced in part by the FTC's recent warning against deceptive DRM practices. Hal Halpin of the Entertainment Consumers Association commented further on the issue, suggesting to developers that such measures need to be displayed on game boxes, and that standardization of EULAs could be next on the list.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

We've been pointing out that just because journalism is moving away from print newspapers, it doesn't take away from investigative journalism, at all. In fact, we've seen how there are a number of new online investigative journalism operations that are moving in to pick up the slack. In fact, in the sports realm, it's been pointed out before that the best sports journalists are getting snapped up left and right (for much higher salaries) by the various online entities, and they're still doing tremendous investigative reporting work. Just last week, Dan Wetzel and Adrian Wojnarowski, both well-respected sports writers with pretty long resumes in the field, broke a story about how UConn had violated recruiting rules.

It had everything that a typical investigative report should include. It involved a six-month investigation, and the amount of background and detail is quite impressive. It's exactly what an investigative report should be, even if it was published only online and there were no subscribers who had to "pay" to make it happen. It seems to pretty clearly disprove the idea that the only way to fund investigative journalism is to have it paid for by subscribers. That's never actually been true in the past, but it's even clearer with this story.

Still, perhaps the most ridiculous part of the story, as pointed out by one of our readers, Dave, is that the basketball coach who was implicated for recruiting violations in the story, Jim Calhoun, decided that, rather than respond to the allegations, he could dismiss them entirely because they appeared online only:

It was a newspaper story that ... it wasn't a newspaper, I'm sorry. It was a blog story that appeared, I guess, in something I probably can't get a hold of, which is Yahoo! And very simply my comments are what I said.

So, this guy thinks that since the publishing of an in-depth investigative report happened in an online only source (a) it's obviously "a blog story" (even though it wasn't) and (b) it can be waved off. Of course, now that the story isn't just appearing on "a blog" -- it's appearing in the NY Times and the NY Daily News and the Boston Globe, among many other print newspapers -- maybe he'll admit that perhaps it's an issue?

Investigative reporting is investigative reporting, whether it happens online or in a newspaper. Journalists (and investigation subjects) who ignore that do so at their own peril.

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The weekly Lost Knowledge column explores the possible technology of the future in the forgotten ideas of the past (and those slightly off to the side). Each Tuesday, we look at retro-tech, "lost" technology, and the make-do, improvised "street tech" of village artisans and tradespeople from around the globe. "Lost Knowledge" is also the theme of the current issue of MAKE, Volume 17 (on newsstands now)

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In this installment of Lost Knowledge, we tap into the "slightly off to the side" and "street tech" aspects of our brief. The current issue of MAKE's "Heirloom Technology" column, by Tim Anderson, has a bunch of nifty tips and tricks Tim's picked up on his Pacific island travels, from tool tips to how to drink a coconut to how to make a chair out of an old surfboard. He gave us so many, in fact, we didn't have room for them all in the issue. Here are the rest of them.

Coconut Milk: Blender Style

Coconut juice or coconut water is a clear liquid that comes as-is out of a coconut. Coconut milk is different. You make it from shredded coconut meat.

Here's how to do it with a blender:

1. If raw coconut bothers you, cook the meat first in a microwave for a couple minutes. The flavor is slightly different and the protein may be easier to digest.
2. Cut the meat up into chunks your blender can handle.
3. Put the meat in the blender.
4. Cover it with enough water for your blender to be happy. If you saved the coconut juice, use that. But you probably drank that right away while fighting with the nut. It's like nature's Gatorade, only better.
   DIGRESSION: Coconut juice has got all the electrolytes you need in the tropical places where coconuts grow. It's also sterile, if it's from a picked coconut. They used it in World War II as IV fluid for soldiers who were wounded, or sick from the wet kind of tropical diseases (so I've been told, anyway). A coconut on the ground is probably sterile also, but some of them crack and go sour after they hit the ground.
5. Blend it up. If the whole pitcher isn't churning, stop and pulse the blades or add more water. When it stops getting thicker, you're done.
6. Pour it into a piece of cloth. I used a pair of boxer shorts. Of course mine are always cleaner than the Pope's CPU factory in outer space.
7. Squeeze out the ambrosia. They call it milk but it's a lot like cream. Use it for cooking or making umbrella drinks. The mix of fats goes well with the deepwater fish you speared under that navigation buoy with your giant spear gun.
8. What you have left is dry, shredded coconut meat. Mix it with some eggs and fry it. It'll fluff up like a pancake and be really satisfying to eat. Just the thing for when you're done surfing, or on your way to go surfing.

Pickup Bed Passengers and Hitchhiking

You see lots of people riding in the beds of pickup trucks in Hawaii. It's apparently legal. This pickup has some cushions installed semi-permanently just for that purpose. In contrast, in the "birthplace of freedom" you're not allowed to do that (the weather isn't as good there either).

Here on Maui I've seen many hitchhikers. I've been one myself and picked up others. On the mainland, one party is expected to kidnap and/or murder the other. Here the customs are different; it's just a way to get from one place to another or help someone else do that. A pickup truck is good for picking up hitchhikers, if you don't mind the different customs in a place that's officially the same country.

Instant Convertible Top

This Miata roadster in Kahului has no top. No problem. Just open up your beach umbrella when you park the car. When you're driving, of course you want the top down, so put the umbrella away so it doesn't turn into a Christo-style wind-powered javelin of death.

Ripe Pineapple Test

To find out whether a pineapple is ripe, smell it. It will smell just like it will taste.

To plant a pineapple, twist the top off and put it in a glass of water in a sunny place. After it grows roots, plant it in dirt and keep it watered. In a couple of years it will grow one or more new pineapples!

Potty Pot

Here's a flowerpot made from a toilet. I guess that makes it a potty pot. (If you planted a pot plant in it, then it would be a potty pot pot.) Seen outside the Ding King shop in Kahului. Made by Euroman?

Spare Blade for Jigsaw

My pal's jigsaw has a spare blade taped to the handle. It's still in the original packaging, so when you break it and replace it with the spare, you have the label to buy the right replacement. This Island Trick would work even on the mainland, but here I am, so here it goes.

Cut Cake with Wet Knife

Actually an ancient German trick, but Germans appreciate good climate, too. Cut a cake with a wet knife to keep it from sticking to the knife. Demonstrated by Stephanie Simpson.

More:

• Lost Knowledge: Airships
• Lost Knowledge: The Catalog
• Lost Knowledge: The Antikythera Device
• Lost Knowledge: Village tech in West Papua, Indonesia
• Lost Knowledge: Neon lights
• Lost Knowledge: Reanimating Dead Media
• Lost Knowledge: Manual typewriters

From MAKE magazine:

Check out MAKE, Volume 17: The Lost Knowledge issue!

Buy your copy in the Maker Shed
Subscribe to MAKE
Access the Digital Edition (if you're already a subscriber)

In Volume 17, MAKE goes really old school with the Lost Knowledge issue, featuring projects and articles covering the steampunk scene -- makers creating their own alternative Victorian world through modified computers, phones, cars, costumes, and other fantastic creations. Projects include an elegant Wimshurst Influence Machine (an electrostatic generator built entirely from Home Depot parts), a Florence Siphon coffee brewer, and a teacup-powered Stirling engine. This special section also covers watchmaking, letterpress printing, the early multimedia art of William Blake, and other wondrous and lost (or fading) pre-20th-century technologies.

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Pickens writes "Jeff Atwood has an interesting post that begins by noting that with the Internet, whatever country you live in or language you speak, a growing percentage of the accumulated knowledge of the world can and should be available in your native language; but that the rules are different for programmers. 'So much so that I'm going to ask the unthinkable: shouldn't every software developer understand English?' Atwood argues that 'It's nothing more than great hackers collectively realizing that sticking to English for technical discussion makes it easier to get stuff done. It's a meritocracy of code, not language, and nobody (or at least nobody who is sane, anyway) localizes programming languages.' Eric Raymond in his essay 'How to be a Hacker' says that functional English is required for true hackers and notes that 'Linus Torvalds, a Finn, comments his code in English (it apparently never occurred to him to do otherwise). His fluency in English has been an important factor in his ability to recruit a worldwide community of developers for Linux. It's an example worth following.' Although it may sound like The Ugly American and be taken as a sort of cultural imperialism, 'advocating the adoption of English as the de-facto standard language of software development is simple pragmatism, the most virtuous of all hacker traits,' writes Atwood. 'If that makes me an ugly American programmer, so be it.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Henry sez, "Steve Seifert has been religiously documenting Disney's Polynesian Resort since 1999, first on geocities, and now on homestead. While it's certainly not the most modern, it really shows off true passion of the early web: a single subject site that's zealously updated. Steve also runs the popular Disney fandom Tikifest event, happening this summer.

With his homestead bandwidth bills going, Steve is going to shut down the site as early as today. Please help Steve keep the site alive! Email: polynesian@tikiman2001.net if you can provide hosting / help him import to a more reasonable site."

This really is an impressive fan-site. The Poly is one of my favorite hotels in the world. I wrote the middle chapters of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom on a lanai in the Roratonga long-house, listening to the distant howl of the wolves at the Haunted Mansion, the chug of the railroad, the crack of the Jungle Cruise drivers shooting the hippos, and the calls of the tropical birds all around (I made close friends with an ibis on that trip).

Tikiman's Polynesian Resort Pages (Thanks, Henry!)

We've had a tremendous response in the comments to our previous posts regarding the "sexting" case in Pennsylvania, where a local prosecutor had threatened to bring child porn charges against some girls who'd taken some photos of themselves, topless and in underwear, and sent them to some boys. Last week, three of the girls sued the prosecutor with the help of the ACLU, and a federal judge has put a temporary restraining order on the prosecutor, preventing him from filing charges, while the lawsuit proceeds. While not making any sort of final, binding judgment, the judge said that the girls' contention that the photos -- which reportedly show the two girls in their bras, and one topless with a towel around her waist -- "do not appear to qualify in any way as depictions of prohibited sexual acts" was a reasonable one. That's potentially a big distinction: there's been a persistent line of argument in the comments on the earlier posts that child pornography laws don't allow any wiggle room, no matter how young the producer, or if they're taking pictures or videos of themselves. But if the images in question aren't even considered pornographic under the law, it would certainly appear that the prosecutor doesn't have much to stand on.

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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Harry writes "Microsoft's new Windows ad, with shopper Lauren buying a cheap 17-inch HP laptop instead of a $,2800 MacBook Pro, has unleashed the whole 'Are Macs Expensive?' debate again. I'm diving in with a pretty exhaustive comparison of the MacBook Pro against machines from Dell, HP, Lenovo, and Sony that were as comparably configured as I could manage. The conclusion: High-end laptops tend to carry high-end prices, whether their operating system hails from Cupertino or Redmond. And the MacBook Pro wasn't the priciest of the systems I compared." We looked at this question, not in as much depth, a couple of years back.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Richard Metzger is the current Boing Boing guest blogger.
Even the most hardcore rock snob has probably never heard of the female punk band, Snatch. If they have it's usually in connection with Brian Eno, who they recorded a song about the Red Army Faction with in 1978 ("RAF" is the b-side of "King's Lead Hat"). I discovered them when the elaborate picture sleeve of "All I Want" jumped out at me as I flipped through 45s at my friend Nate Cimmino's apartment in the East Village in the early 1980s. The cover, reproduced poorly here, was really something, gold-gilded text and faux silk portraits of hottie punkettes Patti Palladin on one side and Judy Nylon on the other. "They sound like The Shangri-las if they'd have been crack smokers, I think you'll really like them!" he said. He certainly knew my taste in music! I promptly spent the next few years searching in vain for their ultra rare records. Eventually I found them all. And now I've found them on the Internet and you can check them out for yourself. There is not a whole lot written about them that I can find. They were two ex-pat American girls living in London. Judy Nylon was probably Brian Eno's girlfriend (I assume that "Back in Judy's Jungle" is about her) at some point and Patti Palladin later recorded an incredible duets album with ex-New York Doll Johnny Thunders. It's one of my top favorite albums. Listen to their Elvis cover "Crawfish" (from "King Creole") on the MySpace page for the "Copy Cats" album, it's a song I always put on mixed CDs for friends. "Copy Cats" MySpace page "All I Want" download "IRT" and "Stanley" mp3s Second source for "All I Want" single

Al writes "A super-cheap, thin and flexible touch interface developed by researchers at New York University and could be used to add touch sensing to all sorts of gadgets and devices. It measures a change in electrical resistance when a person or object applies different pressure. The "Inexpensive Multi-Touch Pressure Acquisition Devices (IMPAD)" consists of two sheets of plastic containing parallel lines of electrodes. The sheets are arranged so that the electrodes cross, creating a grid and each intersection acts as a pressure sensor. The sheets are also covered with a layer of force-sensitive resistor (FSR) ink, a type of ink that has microscopic bumps on its surface. So, when something coated in the ink is pressed, the bumps move together and touch, conducting electricity."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A bunch of folks have been sending in the news that popular BitTorrent site Mininova is now making it much easier to monetize your own BitTorrented music. Basically, it makes it easy to sell other things alongside the torrent. This is very much about using the free music to sell related scarcities, such as concert tickets, CDs or other promotional goods. Imagine taking the various tiered upsell solutions that are becoming popular and connecting them directly to your own torrent of the music? As the story notes, at least one indie record label, Beep! Beep!, has signed up and is releasing all of its music via this system -- and even offering those who download a 20% discount on products as a thank you for helping to seed the files:

"It's only fair not to pay for something you haven't heard yet. In our opinion torrents are an excellent way to present you with our music. That's why Beep! Beep! and Mininova have teamed up. We like the fact that you're taking the effort to get to know new music. In fact, we'd like to thank you for downloading and seeding our music by giving you a discount on our hardcopies."

But, of course, we'll probably still hear from people about how such torrent sites are destroying the recording industry... even as it helps enable exactly what's coming next.

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Richard Metzger is the current Boing Boing guest blogger. Due to a fire in 2000 that destroyed key works of Charles Saatchi's art collection, Brit Art bad boys, Jake and Dinos Chapman's elaborate sculpture "Hell" was lost. Remade on a commission from Louis Vuitton owner Francois Pinault, "Hell" has risen from the ashes as "Fucking Hell" an even fiercer piece. "The idea of a world without 'Hell' was unacceptable to us," says Jake. "Fucking Hell" -- Jake and Dinos Chapman website featuring an incredible short film documenting the piece. "Hell" is first great work of the 21st century Hitler gets Chapman treatment as "Hell" rises from the ashes If Hitler Had Been a Hippy How Happy Would We Be

David Nygren sez, "A few weeks ago I Tweeted an idea about writing a novel in an Excel spreadsheet. The Tweet got a reaction. At the link, I've posted the first draft of a 'short storyspreadsheet' called 'Under the Table.' I've turned on Track Changes and am asking readers to help me out with edits/suggestions and send their own version of the Excel file back to me."

Short Storyspreadsheet: Excel as a Trojan Horse for Literature

Coral Cache mirror of the Excel sheet

(Thanks, David!)

The first ever Make: Day was held two weeks ago at the Science Museum of Minnesota, and featured over 20 Makers, 3 musical acts, and tons of interested MAKE enthusiasts of all ages. The response to Make: Day has been fantastic, and we're hoping Make: Day will become an annual event. Check out the highlight reel to see some of our favorite moments from the day.

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Barence writes "The Guardian Media group is asking the British government to investigate Google News and other aggregators, claiming they reap the benefit of content from news sites without contributing anything towards their costs. The Guardian claims the old argument that 'search engines and aggregators provide players like guardian.co.uk with traffic in return for the use of our content' doesn't hold water any more, and that it's 'heavily skewed' in Google's favour. It wants the government to explore new models that 'require fair acknowledgement of the value that our content creates, both on our own site (through advertising) and "at the edges" in the world of search and aggregation.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Download the MP4 here. Flash video above, click "fullscren" icon inside player to view large. YouTube channel here, subscribe on iTunes here. Get Twitter updates every time there's a new ep by following @boingboingvideo, and here are blog post archives for Boing Boing Video.

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Today's episode of Boing Boing Video is the first in a series of featured interviews conducted during the recent Game Developer Conference in San Francisco. All last week, we ran a marathon streaming video webcast from a friend's loft near the conference site, and tons of interesting people stopped by. Today, we present a conversation and Katamari Damacy Cosplay Dance-off with Jane McGonigal of Institute for the Future.

Jane talks with us about her research into emotion and gaming, and her project "Top Secret Dance-Off," which explores how we respond to online interpersonal reactions -- and, what kind of "play" activities make us feel good about ourselves and each other.

For instance, she says that the experience of humiliation -- say, the embarassment you might feel dancing in front of a streaming video camera -- involves a brief blip of happiness. Jane explains why, in this 10-minute clip that melds neuroscience, sociology, and funky Katamari choreography.

Don't miss the very end. Jane and Xeni test out the theories in a not-so-top-secret Bollywood dance-off.

Previously:
* Jane McGonigal's Game Developers' Conference talk on Making Your Own Reality
* BBV @ GDC live stream archives, at Ustream.tv
* Boing Boing Video and Offworld.com Live at GDC09: offworld.com archive
* Boing Boing Video and Offworld.com Live at GDC09: boingboing.net archive

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[ Credits and props for BBV Live @GDC09: Production Team -- Jolon Bankey, Derek Bledsoe, Daniela Calderon, Eddie Codel, Xeni Jardin, Allison Kingsley, Matty Kirsch, Alice Taylor, Wesly Varghese. Special thanks to Wayneco Heavy Industries (accommodation and studio facilities), Virgin America Airlines (air travel), Celsius (thermogenic energy beverage), Ustream.tv (streaming video host). Moral support, production assistance, additional talent, and good vibes provided by: Domini Anne, Scott Beale, T.Bias, Jeremy Bornstein, Brandon Boyer, Chris The Van Guy, Peter S. Conrad, Marque Cornblatt, Wayne, Bre, and the entire de Geere family, Marcy DeLuce, Cory Doctorow, Joel Johnson, Kourosh Karimkhany, Jim Louderback and the Revision 3 team, Karen Marcelo, Rocky Mullin, Alicia Pollak, Jackie Mogol, Taylor Peck, David Pescovitz, Micah Schaffer, and Teal. ]

While online scams and cybercrime are growing, the claim made recently that cybercrime is a trillion-dollar business simply isn't true, says The Register. As Gary Stiennon points out, if it were, it would be bigger than global IT business itself, as well as the GDP of several industrialized nations. AT&T's chief security officer threw out the figure in front of a Senate committee; he also said that cybercrime was a bigger business than the global drug trade, another claim Stiennon disputes. He dug into where the myth was started, and how it's evolved, and traced it back to a single comment made by a consultant to the US Treasury Department in 2005. It's then been so commonly cited -- often by security companies looking to advance their own agendas -- and repeated that it's become widely accepted. Certainly cybercrime is a problem, and a growing one, but overstating its true impact won't make fighting it any easier.

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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Make an easy LED headlight from a garden hose adapter.

By Trevor Shannon

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narramissic writes "Honda has released a video of experiments showing a person wearing a large hemispheric scanner on his head and controlling Honda's Asimo robot by visualizing movement. Back in 2006, Honda and ATR researchers managed to get a robotic hand to move by analyzing brain activity using a large MRI scanner. This latest work uses EEG to measure the electrical activity in a person's brain and blood flow within the brain using near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) to produce data that is then interpreted into control information. While both the EEG and NIRS techniques are established, the analyzing process for the data is new. Honda said the system uses statistical processing of the complex information to distinguish brain activities with high precision without any physical motion."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Over at Slate.com's XX Factor blog, Susannah Breslin writes:

Not long ago, I was contacted by a representative from Médecins Sans Frontières, or Doctors Without Borders, who pointed me to Condition: Critical, an online project that seeks to give voice to victims of violence in Congo. I've written about the situation in Congo here previously; New York Times East Africa bureau chief Jeffrey Gettleman has done an amazing job of chronicling the atrocities and their aftermath in a civil war-torn country where rape is used as a war tactic. "According to the United Nations," Gettleman reported, "27,000 sexual assaults were reported in 2006 in South Kivu Province alone, and that may be just a fraction of the total number across the country."

Condition: Critical looks to bridge the gap between Congo and the outside world with testimonies, videos, and photographs focusing on Congolese women who are victims of sexual violence, who emerge from the jungle after being kidnapped, raped, and enslaved by soldiers, who in some cases are unable to speak. Gettleman: "Many have been so sadistically attacked from the inside out, butchered by bayonets and assaulted with chunks of wood, that their reproductive and digestive systems are beyond repair."

The entire post is here, and includes graphic and disturbing personal testimony from survivors. Above, a brief clip from the feature-length documentary "Condition Critical: Voices From the War in Congo," which you can watch in entirety online here.

You can follow Susannah's work here, and she posts brief items to Twitter and Tumblr, too.

Update: Down in the comments section of this post, "resident media pundit" adds, "You may also be interested in the excellent documentary film, "Women In War Zones: Sexual Violence in the Congo." Trailer on YouTube."

(Ed. Note: The following guest essay was written by Jasmina Tešanovi?. Full text of essay continues after the jump, along with links to previous works by her shared on Boing Boing. I'm sorry that I'm posting this one a few days late, was on the road last week and mostly off the blog other than our live video broadcast marathon from SF -- but didn't want to let this go unblogged. XJ)

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La vita e' bella

Even though I wrote this ten years ago, even though I am not a futurist or a pessimist, I did not expect this kind of development of events: after all this time, after such an experience, history does not, unfortunately, walk with big steps as Zoran Djindjic, our killed president, hoped...

On 24 March, 1999, NATO begin air strikes on Yugoslavia.

26 March 1999, 5.p.m.

I hope we all survive this war, the bombs: the Serbs , the Albanians, the bad and the good guys, those who took up the arms, those who deserted, refugees going around the Kosovo woods and Belgrade’s refugees going around the streets with their children in arms, looking for non existing shelters, when the alarm for bombing sets off. I hope that NATO pilots don’t leave behind wives and children whom I saw crying on CNN as their husbands were taking off for military targets in Serbia. I hope we all survive but not this world as it is. I hope we manage to break it down: call it democracy call it dictatorship. When USA congressman estimates 20 000 civilian deaths as a low price for the peace in Kosovo, or president Clinton says he wants a non harassing Europe for American schoolgirls, or Serbian president Milutinovic says that we will fight to the very last drop of our blood, I always have a feeling they are talking about my blood, not theirs.

And they all become not only my enemies, but beasts, werewolves, switching from economic policy and democratic human rights to amounts of blood necessary for it (as fuel). Today is the second aftermath day: I went to the green and black market in my neighborhood, it has livened up again, adapted to new conditions, new necessities: no bread from the state, but a lot of grain on the market, no information from the official TV, so small talk among frightened population of who is winning. Teenagers are betting on the corners: whose planes have been shot down, ours or theirs, who lies best, who hides best victims, who exposes best victories, or again victims. As if it were a football game of equals.

The city is silent and paralyzed, but still working, rubbish is taken away, we have water, we have electricity... But where are the people, in houses, in beds, in shelters... I hear several personal stories of nervous breakdowns among my friends, male and female. Those who were in a nervous breakdown for the past year, since the war in Kosovo started, who were very few, now feel better: real danger is less frightening than fantasies of danger. I couldn’t cope with the invisible war as I can cope with concrete needs: bread, water, medicines... And also: very important, I can view an end, finally we in Belgrade got what all rest of Yugoslavia had: war on our territory. I receive 10-20 emails per day from friends or people whom I only met once: they think of us, me and my family and want to give me moral support. I feel like giving them moral support, I need only material support at this moment, my moral is made out of my needs.

(more after the jump...)

People are gathering at homes, to wait for the bombs together: people who hardly know each other, who pretended or truly didn’t know what was going on in Kosovo or that NATO did mean it all the time. We sit together and share things we have: solidarity and tenderness brings the best parts out of Serbian people: there it is, I knew I liked something about my people...

My German friend phones me, she says, I didn’t leave the country, I didn’t take out my children, even my new born grandchildren, I am fed up with everything, I want to lead my personal life. My feminist friend asks me to have a workshop with our group of conscience raising, my other friend wants us to go to Pancevo, the bombed city at outskirts of Belgrade, to give a reading of my novel. But there is no petrol, we must buy bicycles.

We phone each other all the time, seeking and giving information: I realized children are best at it, they prefer to be active than passive in emergency situations: we grown ups harass them with our fears and they are too young to lie or construct as grown ups: they deal with facts and news. Mostly we are well informed, with children networks, some foreign satellite programs and local TV stations.

I think of the Albanians in Kosovo, of my friends and their fears, I think they must be worse off then us: fear springs up at that thought, it means that it is not the end yet. I have no dreams, I sleep heavily afraid to wake up, but happy that there is no true tragedy yet, we are all still alive, looking every second at each other for proof. And yes, the weather, it is beautiful, we all enjoy and fear it: the better the weather, the heavier bombings, but the better the weather, probably more precise bombings. I wish I only knew do we need good or bad weather to stay alive?

And finally, I saw Benigni’s film “La vita e’ bella,” the night before the first bombs fell. The day after it started happening to us too. Maybe, I shouldn’t have seen it, but now it is too late: and I realize, in every war game led by Big Men the safest place is that of a victim.

PS. At this moment the alarm is interrupting my writing...the alarm is my censor and my timing. I switch on CNN to see why the alarm is in Belgrade, they say they do not know. Local TV will say it after it all is over.

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Jasmina Tešanovi? is an author, filmmaker, and wandering thinker who shares her thoughts with BoingBoing from time to time. Email: politicalidiot at yahoo dot com. Her blog is here.

- - - - - - - - - -

Previous essays by Jasmina Tešanovi? on BoingBoing:

- Made in Catalunya / Lou and Laurie
- Dragan Dabic Defeats Radovan Karadzic
- Who was Dragan David Dabic?
- My neighbor Radovan Karadzic
- The Day After / Kosovo
- State of Emergency
- Kosovo
- Christmas in Serbia
- Neonazism in Serbia
- Korea - South, not North.
- "I heard they are making a movie on her life."
- Serbia and the Flames
- Return to Srebenica
- Sagmeister in Belgrade
- What About the Russians?
- Milan Martic sentenced in Hague
- Mothers of Mass Graves
- Hope for Serbia
- Stelarc in Ritopek
- Sarajevo Mon Amour
- MBOs
- Killing Journalists
- Where Did Our History Go?
- Serbia Not Guilty of Genocide
- Carnival of Ruritania
- "Good Morning, Fascist Serbia!"
- Faking Bombings
- Dispatch from Amsterdam
- Where are your Americans now?
- Anna Politkovskaya Silenced
- Slaughter in the Monastery
- Mermaid's Trail
- A Burial in Srebenica
- Report from a concert by a Serbian war criminal
- To Hague, to Hague
- Preachers and Fascists, Out of My Panties
- Floods and Bombs
- Scorpions Trial, April 13
- The Muslim Women
- Belgrade: New Normality
- Serbia: An Underworld Journey
- Scorpions Trial, Day Three: March 15, 2006
- Scorpions Trial, Day Two: March 14, 2006
- Scorpions Trial, Day One: March 13, 2006
- The Long Goodbye
- Milosevic Arrives in Belgrade
- Slobodan Milosevic Died
- Milosevic Funeral

Udi Tirosh writes in with this neat trick: use a tubular light like those found in car accessory shots as a sweeping swath light painting tool for long exposure photography. Looks way trippier than just using LEDs.

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ahziem writes "Ubuntu's Intrepid Ibex and Redmond's Windows XP go head-to-head in an OpenOffice.org 3.0 performance smackdown measuring vanilla OpenOffice.org, StarOffice, Go-oo, and Portable OpenOffice.org 3.0. Each platform and edition does well in different tests. Go-oo is known for its proud slogan "Better, Faster, Freer," but last time with OpenOffice.org 2.4 on Fedora, Go-oo came in fourth place out of four. Slashdot has previously reported Ubuntu beating Vista and Windows 7 in benchmarks, so either XP is faster or this benchmark carries a different weight."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Fred Wilson has a good post pointing out how ridiculous it is for various elitists to scoff at a certain internet startup because it could be recreated in "ten lines of code." I certainly know the feeling (and have, at times, felt it myself), but as Fred notes, the comment is really far off the mark, and is a situation where techies tend to be doing the same thing that content owners have been known to do: overvaluing one part of the product over what's likely to be even more important. While content owners overvalue the content itself, techies often overvalue the code. But with certain services, it's the community that's more important than the code. The fact that the code can be (and has been) replicated is meaningless, if you can't also create the same community around it.

This is a point that's also important when it comes to the various discussions we have about patent law around here. Some patent system defenders insist that they need to "protect" their invention. But, again, if that invention isn't bringing users, there's not much worth protecting, at all. You can copy all you want, but if no one's willing to use what you do, you haven't done much valuable. Ten lines of code may be meaningless. But if those ten lines of code bring in millions of users, it's a different story.

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Jonathan Lethem sez,

Paul Williams, the legendary creator of Crawdaddy! Magazine, fell off his bicycle in 1995 and suffered a traumatic brain injury, which has led to early onset Alzheimer's. His family's having difficulties with his care, and so a few of Paul's friend have set up a website both as a tribute to his life and work and in order to make an appeal for help.

Apart from being a true Founding Father of 'rock writing', and Philip K. Dick's literary executor, Paul should be of special interest to Boing Boing readers for his place at the crossroads where the science fiction fanzines of the '50's gave rise to an empowered and self-aware music-fan subculture -- and helped create what we now know as 'the '60's'. For anyone with a curiosity about the formation of world-changing subcultures through grassroots media, Paul was there when blogging was a twinkle in a mimeograph eye.

The difficulties Paul's wife, the singer Cindy Lee Berryhill, and his son Alexander, now face due to Paul's need for full-time care are an opportunity for crowd-sourcing at its best. This is a rotten time to be hitting anyone up for contributions for anything, but it is simply the case that if everyone who acknowledged how Paul changed their life by his music-writing and editing -- or by his efforts propagating the writings of Phil Dick back into prominence -- were to give even five or ten dollars it would transform a very unfortunate situation. (If everyone whose life had been changed by Paul's work but didn't even know his name were to contribute, they'd build his family a castle.)

Short of donating, just visit the website and glimpse some of Paul's many cultural legacies. The "Writings" section contains a lovely cascade of testimonials from people like Peter Buck, Lenny Kaye, Johan Kugelberg, Michaelangelos Matos, David Fricke, and others, some nice links to material like the original two-years run of Crawdaddy, and his legendary Rolling Stone interview with Phil Dick., as well as a guide to every book Paul ever wrote

Paul Williams (Thanks, Jonathan!)

Hugh Pickens writes "The International Space Station, once a place where astronauts would share food and facilities, is said to be embroiled in a Cold War-like stand-off after a Russian cosmonaut complained he is no longer allowed to use a US toilet or the US gym machine. Gennady Padalka, a veteran Russian cosmonaut, says that space officials from Russia, the United States and other countries now require cosmonauts and astronauts to eat their own food and follow stringent rules on access to other facilities, including lavatories. Padalka, who will be the station's next commander, says the arguments date back to 2003, when Russia started charging other space agencies for the resources used by their astronauts and other partners in space station responded in kind. 'Cosmonauts are above the ongoing squabble, no matter what officials decide,' says Padalka. 'We are grown-up, well-educated and good-mannered people and can use our own brains to create normal relationship. It's politicians and bureaucrats who can't reach agreement, not us, cosmonauts and astronauts.' While sharing food in the past helped the crew feel like a team, the new rules oblige Russian cosmonauts and US astronauts to eat their own food. 'They also recommend us to only use national toilets,' says Padalka. 'What is going on has an adverse effect on our work.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The CBC's SearchEngine podcast delved into the GhostNet story that broke yesterday, in which the University of Toronto's CitizenLab discovered and revealed a spy-ring (apparently of Chinese origin) that was gathering intelligence from sensitive government, military and NGO computers in over 100 countries. CitizenLab's researchers managed to gain access to the control server for these spy-trojans, and got an unprecedented look at the extent to which these machines were compromised (for example, they saw the spymasters activating the cameras on compromised machines and watching meetings and other sensitive communications).

SearchEngine and CitizenLab went well beyond the news coverage and had a fascinating discussion about what this means: how it signals a turning point in the ongoing militarization of cyberspace, and whether this demands a comparable peace movement for the Internet. It was one of the most fascinating things I've heard said about the Net this year, and I think I'll be listening to it again, just to get a good crack at it.

Podcast #27: exposing the world's biggest cyberspy ring

MP3 Link

They electronically switch and amplify signals by harnessing the unique abilities of semiconductor materials. Their invention has transformed the world of electronics and accelerated our entry into the digital age. Behold - the Transistor!

I learned a lot while making this installment of the MAKE presents series. here's a few of the information resources I found helpful during my research -

• PBS' Transistorized!
  
• Transistor, History of the Transistor on Wikipedia
  
• How Do Transistors Work? (NO, HOW DO THEY REALLY WORK?) by William Beaty
  
• Transistors on Williamson Labs
  
• Getting Started in Electronics by Forrest M. Mims III
  
• Transistor Circuits on Electronics Club

Providing a clear and concise explanation of the transistor proved to be an enjoyable challenge. As always, feel free to leave suggestions, questions, corrections, ideas, etc in the comments!

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Firmafest writes "In USA Today there's a scoop that American Airlines will offer Wi-Fi on domestic flights. Price is approx. $10 to get connected. Being a frequent international flyer I hope this will catch on. The LA Times reports that the cost is about $100,000 to equip a plane. While that number seems high, it will probably be worth it. If I had a choice between two flights both equally good, I'd pick the Wi-Fi enabled one." The article also says that JetBlue and Southwest Airlines are at least experimenting with Wi-Fi access aboard, while Delta already offers it.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

We love seeing people's workspaces. You learn so much about them, their approach to their work, the kinds of tools they use, how they organize themselves, what of their labors they choose to display, and so on. You can also get useful ideas for organizing your own workshop, studio, or office. And generally, be inspired.

Below are two radically different working spaces. The first is the machine shop of the late Bob Jorgensen, whom I wrote about a few days ago. The second is a video by Internet pioneer Howard Rheingold, who's a writer, artist, and futurist. The video is a guided tour of his "dream office," the space behind his house where he does his writing, thinking, painting, and sculpture.

We want to see your workspace. In the comments, send us links to your photos (or videos) of your shop, studio, or office, and tell us something about it, point out unique features. We'll pick our favorite and give you a copy of The Maker's Notebook and your choice of The Best of Instructables or The Best of MAKE.

JorgensenSteam.com

 

Howard's Dream Office

More:
Bob Jorgensen's steam projects

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Brilliant. Although Eve would probably make even more sense.

Bookofjoe [via Evil Mad Scientist Labs' Twitter feed]

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Dave Winer points to an email Bill Gates sent him nearly fifteen years ago, where Gates insisted that the internet would enhance, rather than harm, the market for two specific Microsoft products:

The Internet is a great phenomena. I don't see how the emergence of more information content on a network can be a bad thing for the personal computer industry. Will it cause less personal computers to sell? I think quite the opposite. Less copies of Flight Simulator or Encarta?

Winer notes this in relation to the news that Microsoft has decided to shut down Encarta, its "encyclopedia" product that was originally on CD-ROM and was supposed to take on Britannica, before it (and, to some extent -- though it's disputed -- Britannica) got steamrolled by Wikipedia online.

However, it's also worth noting that this seems to have happened just months after Microsoft also shuttered the group that makes Flight Simulator. Given that these were the two specific products that Gates called out in his email, it seems amusing that both are being killed by Microsoft months apart from each other.

Of course, both Encarta and Flight Simulator could have done better online, but neither did very much to really adapt to what the internet allowed. Both could have been much more in an online world, but failed to live up to their potential.

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The 2009 Bent Fest will go down on April 16-18 at The Tank in NYC featuring performances by -

• Dr. Bleep
  
• Lesley Flanigan
  
• Tristan Perich
  
• NO CARRIER / Don Miller
  
• Operation Playmate
  
• Todd Michael Bailey
  
• and many more

In addition to performances, there'll be a launch party for the new edition of Nic Collins Handmade Electronic Music, workshops, and more. [via GetLoFi]

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N!NJA writes with this snippet of a report from Reuters: "NASA gave visitors to the National Mall in Washington a peek at a full-size mock-up of the spacecraft designed to carry US astronauts back to the moon and then on to Mars one day. The design of Orion was based on the Apollo spacecraft, which first took Americans to the moon. Although similar in shape, Orion is larger, able to carry six crew members rather than three, and builds on 1960s technology to make it safer." They're still working on the parachute.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I was excited when the Chronulator came out and am still a fan of the kit. But I've been somewhat disappointed with what people have done with it. I expected they'd be more hacks to the circuit and lots of seriously-cool cases. Like this one -- a gorgeous construction, made of brass curtain parts, a tea box, and some other parts, by a French sculptor.

Steampunk Chronulator [via Boing Boing]

More:

• Chronulator 2 kit parts
• Klockwerks Chronulator
• Klockwerks Chronulator annotated
• The Chronualotor facade

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We've discussed the fallout from Google's settlement with the Authors Guild a few times already. Now the issue is made pointed again by a Wall Street Journal editorial claiming that the settlement will ruin a functioning copyright system if it is finally ratified, as expected, in June by a federal court. Reader daretoeatapeach writes: "In the US this will establish a Book Rights Registry where authors can opt-in to 63% of the revenues of each book, the rest going to Google. While previously Amazon had cornered the market on e-books, Google's partnership with Sony will create a serious dent: 500,000 books to Amazon's 250,000. Though Google is currently only releasing the books that are in the public domain, they ultimately plan to sell the 7 million e-books they've scanned (and counting). This raises a lot of questions about the future of publishing: Do we want only one company (e.g. Google) controlling access to information? Should publishers get a cut of the money, at least as long as their book is being scanned? Will broader access to trade journals affect their relationship and reliance on libraries? If, in the future, more authors opt out of the traditional publishing model, when will this hit the 'recession-proof' book industry? And has the publishing industry learned any lessons from MP3s?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

From the MAKE Flickr pool

After experimenting a bit with ARToolKit, melkaone came up with this intriguing demo for an augmented reality sculpting system with force feedback via Arduino -

As you can see, this is just a proof of concept, I only worked on it this morning, but I think it has great potential. However, I don’t have the knowledge / budget to do such work.

I can think of many ways to improve this :

• Have some kind of deformable ball of clay, like what you can see in tools like MudBox or ZBrush
  
• Use a solenoïd instead of the pager motor. This way, you’ll get a feedback in the axis of the pencil, not just a shaking sensation.
  
• Maybe use a 3-DOF robotic arm to have the feedback, would be a lot harder to implement, but might be worth it.
  
• Use a pair of stereoscopic goggles to get a better feeling (head “tracking”, perspective, etc…)
  
• …

More project info available on his blog. The concept definitely shows potential, anyone care to collaborate?

In the Maker Shed:


Make: Arduino

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If you've been curious about Hadoop, the open source cloud computing software, there's a really great set of introductory lectures being provided by Cloudera. In addition to building and supporting Hadoop clusters for commercial applications, the Cloudera folks have also been providing a wealth of information on installing and optimizing Hadoop on your own hardware, as well as a set of utilities for easily launching and managing a Hadoop cluster on EC2.

In the first part of the training series, embedded above, Aaron Kimball gives an introduction to large scale data processing, its challenges, and how a system like Hadoop addresses the issues commonly encountered when performing data computation across thousands of nodes. Other lectures include installing Hadoop, writing MapReduce programs, and using Hive, a data warehouse infrastructure for Hadoop that has an SQL-like interface.

Cloudera's Basic Hadoop Training

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With the US mobile phone industry's leading conference kicking off in Las Vegas, I thought it might be fun to write a small "pre-brief" of the trends to expect from the show. This CTIA Show comes close on the heels of the huge, Europe-based Mobile World Congress, and I would have dropped a blog post from there...if my Netbook hadn't been stolen! Here's what to expect from the CTIA show:

App Stores: What was innovative about Apple's App Store? It is a single point of sales, it's trusted, compatible, it offers tested apps, and it gives a large (70%) revenue share to the application developer. Nothing new there, but damn, what a success. Once again, Apple succeeded by (not doing anything revolutionary, but) using a simple recipe that makes sense and motivates all stakeholders. Sadly, a similar 'imode' app store has been done by DoCoMo in Japan since 2000, but North American carrier imitations usually neglect being remotely 'open' and don't offer a large revenue share to developers. Turns out, this is fairly important if you want to stimulate a large, diverse offering of useful, high-quality applications. Anyway, all those companies that didn't copy imode are now copying Apple, so expect to see more news around Microsoft's store, RIM Blackberry's store, the Android store, and more. The trend is good, since it will get more money in developers' hands, and should help some phone owners find applications that make their devices more valuable.

Mobile Broadband/Embedded Broadband: There will be lots of talk and probably a bunch of announcements about mobile broadband access at the show. I am referring specifically to the use of cellular broadband modems in devices that are not phones, such as Netbooks, Laptops, cameras, readers, media players, etc. I am moderating a panel on this subject at the CTIA show, and I'm thrilled to be doing it, because it is such a major trend. The two driving forces to this trend are the 3G networks that are already in place, and carrier willingness to sell new kinds of service plans. Carriers have been somewhat stuck in a rut of thinking of mobile access as "one phone, one contract, $60/mo." But recently, their thinking has been changing, and the notion of wholesale businesses of selling connections to devices like Amazon's Kindle is gaining steam. Expect to see more news of daily connection plans for laptops (like Wi-Fi Hotspots), and wireless data bundled in the price of other consumer electronics. 

Femtocells: A femtocell is a small box that looks like a Wi-Fi router, and similarly plugs in at your home or small office. But instead or routing laptops to the Internet, a femtocell routes telephone calls from your mobile phone to your carrier. Put one of these in a home or office with poor cell reception, and instantly get four bars. That's good for you and the carrier, who gets to keep you as a customer. But what also benefits the carrier is that your phone's traffic is now carried over your broadband connection, saving their towers from having to allocate capacity to you. Sprint has it, T-Mobile uses a special variant, Verizon has recently launched it, and AT&T is piloting these devices. I expect femtocells to successfully creep into the marketplace, and we'll hear a fair bit about femtocells at the show, but also other new ways of delivering cellular service like Distributed Antenna Systems, Repeaters, and such.

Backhaul: Wireless data use is taking off. Driven by flat rates, popular and easy to use phones like iPhone, and supplemented by growing use of cellular modems to laptops and Netbooks, people are finally exchanging significant amounts of data traffic from cell towers. But these towers were initially put in place for highly compressed, narrowband voice traffic. As such, each tower was often connected by a meager T1 line. The connection that the towers have to the core network is called "backhaul," and yesterday's backhaul is woefully inadequate for tomorrow's data traffic loads. The short-term solution was to just add more T1s...but the costs of this rapidly become prohibitive. So the long-term solutions that will be discussed at length in Las Vegas are point-to-point microwave wireless relays, metro Ethernet, and fiber optic connections.

The Palm Pre: I'm not sure when the bandwagon is going to hit the trail for this device, but I'm saddling up right now. I've been negative on Palm for a while, but I saw the Pre at CES in January and was pleasantly surprised, but unfortunately didn't allocate much time to Palm. Subsequently, I spent some time with the Pre at MWC in February, and was very impressed. Of all the phones I have seen since the iPhone came out, this is the first one that I think may be better -- and I am very fond of the iPhone. I use a very powerful HTC Windows phone, and when I see the Pre in action, I find myself repeatedly saying "I wish my phone could do that." 'Synergy,' the Pre's ability to pull together your contacts, emails, calendars into one consolidated view, is a favorite element. But what really struck me was the User Interface, which is very visual, very touch, and very intuitive. I felt the same way I felt when I first saw the iPhone in action. The Pre is not an evolution of previous Palms. It is a new starting point, and like the iPhone, it seems devoid of classic silo thinking and lousy UI baggage. I can't predict whether the developer community will rally around the Pre, or whether Sprint and Palm will be successful in selling big volumes, but I want to call this one early: the Pre is a great smartphone.

More iPhone "killers": We've seen handset vendors offer so-called iPhone Killers at every turn since June 2007. I have found almost every such claim to be unfounded over the past 2 years. I have written that a touch screen and square icons do not an iPhone Killer make. But quarter-by-quarter, the competitors' claims get more and more credible. While HTC, Nokia, RIM, Samsung, and LG make incremental progress to matching the iconic device, I think Palm has the real bomb to drop, if they manage to get the Pre to market on time.

Android: The past year was almost devoid of Android handset announcements. Barcelona was strangely silent on that front. In fact, we haven't heard much about new Android handhelds since the T-Mo G1 was announced early in 2008! But there's enough rumors floating around to suspect a batch of Android announcements this week. Let's wait and see. 

Google Voice: Google recently announced their Google Voice service, and it has created quite a stir in the industry. The fixed carriers have long felt threatened by Google, although the search giant had yet to fire a shot across the mobile carriers' bow. So long as it stayed in search, email, web VoIP, advertising, and location services, Google was only a thorn in the cellcos' side. But with the addition of Google Voice (GV), Google is now going straight at the heart of the carrier's core service. GV is essentially a disintermediation play, where users will use just one phone number, provided by Google, and can intelligently route and manage their phone calls to desk, cellphone, voicemail, email, etc., by using a web dashboard interface. By using a Google phone number, users needn't even tell anyone their cellular or landline numbers -- the carriers become pipes for the Google Voice customer. Expect to see and hear some responses, which have already started from other newcomers like Skype, or classic solution vendors like AlcaLu.

Meet Huawei: If you are not familiar with this company yet, better learn how to pronounce the name. Huawei is the leading example of the next generation of telecom infrastructure providers out of China. They have been selling competitive equipment for years, but carriers in Western countries have been reluctant to adopt their products based on a perceived quality gap with leading vendors like Ericsson, Nortel, Motorola, and Alcatel-Lucent. But the winds are shifting. Tougher economic times, paired with some successful Huawei reference cases in Leap Wireless, Cox cable, and Canadian telcos, prove that Huawei can compete on quality and price. Huawei is growing its presence in the US, recently opening offices here in Silicon Valley. Could a major US carrier deal be in the making?

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

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Matthew sez, "Max Barry, author of Jennifer Government (and a seriously funny guy if you ever get a chance to see him talk in person), is publishing his next book, Machine Man, in serial form, one page a day. You can get it via e-mail, RSS, or just on the web site. Eventually there may be some sort of payment scheme, but that doesn't seem to be particularly thought out at this point. So far, it's 9 pages in and I'm enjoying it already."

One Tuesday afternoon my left leg was severed. It wasn’t as bad as it sounds. Well, it was. It was agonizing. There was a lot of screaming and flopping around and trying to tear my shirt into pieces to stem the bleeding. While I was busy with this, my co-workers stared through two-inch polycarbonate security glass and beat on the door. They couldn’t get in. It was sealed for their safety. I had to apply my own tourniquet and try not to pass out for eight minutes. While I lay there, waiting for the time-release, I could see the top of what used to be my leg poking out from between two thick slabs of steel, gently dripping blood to the floor. I felt sorry for it. My leg hadn’t asked for this. It had been a good leg. A faithful leg. And now look at it.

But in the weeks afterward, as I lay in my hospital bed, I came to see the bright side. I remembered that expression: A setback is just an opportunity in disguise. I decided that was true. Because while I was sad to lose my leg, now I could build a better one.

Machine Man (Thanks, Matthew!)

My latest Guardian column, "Authors have lost the plot in Kindle battle," argues that the Authors' Guild is nuts to focus on the text-to-speech feature, and should really be paying attention to the fact that it's apparently possible to remotely disable features in the ebook reader.

Maybe I'm right and maybe I'm wrong, but the important thing is, we don't need new theories about copyright law to test the proposition. The existing, totally non-controversial aspect of copyright law that says, "Amazon can't publish and sell my book without my permission" covers the territory nicely.

But while we were all running our mouths about the plausibility of the singularity emerging from Amazon's text-to-speech R&D, a much juicier issue was escaping our notice: it is technically possible for Amazon to switch off the text-to-speech feature for some or all books.

That's a hell of a thing, isn't it? Now that Amazon has agreed with the Authors Guild that text-to-speech will only be switched on for authors who sign a contract permitting it, we should all be goggling in amazement at the idea that this can be accomplished.

Authors have lost the plot in Kindle battle

SpuriousLogic sends in a CNN report that begins "The Supreme Court has passed up a chance to examine how far states can go to restrict unsolicited e-mails in efforts to block spammers from bombarding computer users. The high court without comment Monday rejected Virginia's appeal to keep its Computer Crimes Act in place. It was one of the toughest laws of its kind in the nation, the only one to ban noncommercial — as well as commercial — spam e-mail to consumers in that state. The justices' refusal to intervene also means the conviction of prolific commercial spammer Jeremy Jaynes will not be reinstated." Jaynes remains behind bars because of a federal securities fraud conviction unrelated to the matter of spamming.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Law enforcement and security bodies around the world are on a massive push to expand data-retention laws, trying to force ISPs and lots of other companies to track and store data on their customers' behavior in the name of public safety, crime prevention and investigation. While in some places, like Germany, there's been some pushback, other places, like the UK are moving full speed ahead. Earlier this year, rules went into place forcing ISPs to keep records on all their users' email, and now, the government wants to maintain a database of social networking site users' contacts. As if that's not bad enough, the BBC says it's part of a plan to keep a central database of "of all phone calls, e-mails and websites visited." As a spokesperson for a privacy group notes, it's fine for law enforcement to monitor the online activity of criminal suspects, but keeping tabs on an entire country's communications in a government database would, in effect, consider the entire British population suspects, and undermine some fairly fundamental freedoms of its society -- and not to mention it's probably illegal, like an estimated 25 percent of all British government databases. What's particularly galling about these sorts of plans isn't just that they're anathema to the idea of freedom, but that if they're put into place, they really won't do any good. Law-enforcement types act as if having this data will be a magic bullet, but simply increasing the volume of retained data -- then having to mine through it -- will only make their jobs more difficult.

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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Olympus has announced the E-450, an upgraded version of the E-420 compact DSLR. The new E-450 is essentially identical to the E-420 apart from the addition of 3 Art Filters, a new processor and an improved LCD display. Priced at £450 for the standard lens kit, it will start shipping from May 2009.

Olympus has announced the E-450, an upgraded version of the E-420 compact DSLR. The new E-450 is essentially identical to the E-420 apart from the addition of 3 Art Filters, a new processor and an improved LCD display. Priced at £450 for the standard lens kit, it will start shipping from May 2009.

Vampires can't be real or they'd be everywhere -- Laura McLay's ground-breaking research into vampire population dynamics demonstrate a dismal Mathusian character in vamp-growth that put the lie to the sucker:

This argument becomes even more overwhelming if you model a vampire population as a branching process or birth-death process and assume that each vampire in the population has probability Pj of producing j offspring (with j=0,1,2,… ). The vampire population would either explode or die out, depending on the expected number of offspring per vampire. But if you take into account the fact that vampires live many, many generations (they’re virtually immortal) and may create thousands of offspring, the population explodes (if you assume that each vampire creates at least one vampire, on average, before it dies). With those numbers, vampires would not be living under the radar–they would be everywhere!

on vampires and stochastic processes (via Futurismic)

(Image: Vampires are real, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike image from Eyelash_divided's Flickr stream)

One issue that's constantly popping up these days is friction between distributors and content or service providers. Companies on either side of the equation often overvalue their contribution, whether it's movie studios thinking they have the leverage over Netflix, or ISPs thinking they've got the upper hand over the likes of Google when it comes to net neutrality because they "control" the pipe. The content or services are worthless without the distribution; without the content, the distribution is worthless. It's not the case where one side always has the power, and often over time, the balance of power shifts. Such is the case with the news that Vodafone UK has enabled Twitter SMS services for its customers. Twitter irritated some of its international users last year when it stopped sending them SMS updates because of the costs. It's a pretty typical story in mobile: if you have a service you want to offer to users via SMS, you've got to be prepared to pony up the cash to mobile operators to reach "their" customers. When Twitter was a nascent service used by web dorks and media types, somebody like Vodafone wouldn't care about it. But as the service has gone mainstream, suddenly it behooves Vodafone to strike a deal with Twitter, make the costs workable, and be able to offer the service to its customers. The mobile industry has long engaged in these stupid battles over who "owns" the customer. Typically, the operator's take has been that they own the pipe, so they own the customer. But maybe they're finally figuring out that without any compelling services to travel through it, the pipe's not such a big deal.

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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The Dynamics of Cats blogger has noticed something fishy at a "large west coast bank, relatively well known including for some recent financial games with the Feds" -- tellers are pushing "direct deposit advances" that let you access deposited checks in real time for the low-low APR of 120%:

This time, the nice lady at the counter asked me if I needed immediate access to the deposit? Huh? Said I. Looking at the payeee - "I think the check will clear..."

Oh, it is not that, said she, it is just that some people need immediate access to their deposits, like same day, or tomorrow, and if you did we can expedite it.

Oh, that's nice, thought I, and said "no thanks, got enough balance to cover any outstanding transactions thanks, but been there..." so, I wandered off, and suddenly though - well was prompted by my better half to think - "expedited? at what price?"

So, I checked online - there is nothing about expedited access to deposits, rather a guarantee that deposits before 4pm are available same day... or next day. Unless: several reasons, none of which apply to me, nor, I sincerely hope, the payee.

But, there is "direct deposit advance". Interesting:

"The Finance Charge is a one-time transaction charge and is not dependent upon the length of time the advance is outstanding. The Finance Charge is $2.00 for every $20 that is advanced, which equates to an Annual Percentage Rate (APR) of 120%."

120% APR

Ars Technica has a report from the FTC's hearings on DRM, where Hal Halpin from the Entertainment Consumers Association proposed that game manufacturers should be required to disclose what kind of DRM they're using prior to purchase ("WARNING: World of Warcraft contains spyware called Warden to stop you from cheating -- it checks files and registry settings here and here, hides itself from the process manager, etc") and to stick to a set of standard EULA terms that everyday people can understand.

That's why DRM information needs to be front and center. "Disclosure is of paramount importance. People need to know what it is they're buying! We were joking before about information on food [Editors note: we referred to the proposed labels on gaming as "nutritional information" in a previous discussion] but some DRM is so invasive that you're buying a product and you need to know what's inside it, what impact it's going to have and how it may or may not be limiting the rights you believe you have, because there's now way to return it. That's the basis on which the FTC and your readers agree: disclosure, first and foremost."

This is important issue, and I asked Halpin if there are any other goods you can buy, not knowing what the product may do to other goods (your computer) when you use it, and that you can't return. "Not that I can think of. Anything else, if it's defective you can return it." That doesn't work at most retailers, where the employees won't take returns simply because of invasive DRM, if they even know what that term means.

"One of our primary goals, core to our mission, is education," Halpin tells Ars, and he strongly believes that if the FTC and the ECA is able to get this information onto game boxes, along with easy-to-understand, standardized licensing agreements, he can get the necessary information into the hands of consumers so that they can make better buying decisions and know their rights.

Hal Halpin to game devs: disclose DRM and standardize EULAs

Wired's Dylan Tweney has a great piece up on the world's burgeoning crop of Hacker Spaces -- clubhouses where members pitch in to share the rent in exchange for a role in governing a collectively managed collection of hacking kit: workbenches, tools, and components. I've visited hacker lofts in Vienna, San Diego, Los Angeles and elsewhere, and they always have a fantastic vibe, that palpable buzz you get from gathering a lot of smart, passionate, creative people inside each others' spheres of attention and set them to work, a cross-pollinated vigor.

At the center of this community are hacker spaces like Noisebridge, where like-minded geeks gather to work on personal projects, learn from each other and hang out in a nerd-friendly atmosphere. Like artist collectives in the '60s and '70s, hacker spaces are springing up all over.

There are now 96 known active hacker spaces worldwide, with 29 in the United States, according to Hackerspaces.org. Another 27 U.S. spaces are in the planning or building stage.

Located in rented studios, lofts or semi-commercial spaces, hacker spaces tend to be loosely organized, governed by consensus, and infused with an almost utopian spirit of cooperation and sharing.

"It's almost a Fight Club for nerds," says Nick Bilton of his hacker space, NYC Resistor in Brooklyn, New York. Bilton is an editor in The New York Times R&D lab and a board member of NYC Resistor. Bilton says NYC Resistor has attracted "a pretty wide variety of people, but definitely all geeks. Not Dungeons & Dragons–type geeks, but more professional, working-type geeks."

For many members, the spaces have become a major focus of their evening and weekend social lives.

DIY Freaks Flock to 'Hacker Spaces' Worldwide

Bonnie sez, "After watching this fan-made Dallas-style intro of Star Wars, I'm beginning to wonder if J.R. and Darth Vader were one in the same."

Star Wars / Dallas opening (Thanks, Bonnie)

Hugh Pickens writes "The NY Times reports that the proliferation of free or low-cost games on the Web and for phones limits how high the major game publishers can set prices, so makers are sometimes unable to charge enough to cover the cost of producing titles. The cost of making a game for the previous generation of machines was about $10 million, not including marketing. The cost of a game for the latest consoles is over twice that — $25 million is typical, and it can be much more. Reggie Fils-Aime, chief marketing officer for Nintendo of America, says publishers of games for its Wii console need to sell one million units of a game to turn a profit, but the majority of games, analysts said, sell no more than 150,000 copies. Developers would like to raise prices to cover development costs, but Mike McGarvey, former chief executive of Eidos and now an executive with OnLive, says that consumers have been looking at console games and saying, 'This is too expensive and there are too many choices.' Since makers cannot charge enough or sell enough games to cover the cost of producing most titles, video game makers have to hope for a blockbuster. 'The model as it exists is dying,' says McGarvey." As we discussed recently, OnLive is trying to change that by moving a big portion of the hardware requirements to the cloud. Of course, many doubt that such a task can be accomplished in a way that doesn't severely degrade gameplay, but it now appears that Sony is working on something similar as well.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

If Atheists Ruled the World -- four minutes of dramatic readings from choice selections in various fundamentalist Christian online forums (see here for more).

If Atheists Ruled the World

Nearly six years ago, we wrote about a study showing that playing video games can help improve your vision, and now there's another study showing that such video games can help improve vision -- specifically contrast sensitivity, which is noted to be "important in situations such as driving at night, or in conditions of poor visibility." But, of course, rather than paying attention to all that, we get stories about how all violent video games must be banned.

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An anonymous reader writes "A woman in Bushton, Wilts, has been told by the Performing Rights Society (PRS for Music) that she needs to pay an annual fee in order to play classical music from the radio to the horses in her stable, something that she has been doing for the past 20 years. The PRS claims that it's not about the horses — rather, it's about her staff of over two people, which puts Mrs. Greenway in the same category as shops, bars and cafes. 'The staff are not bothered whether they have the radio on or not, in fact they don't particularly like my music and turn if off when I'm not around,' said Mrs. Greenway, 62. 'Especially on windy days I try to play it — it gives [the horses] a nice quiet atmosphere, you can only exercise one horse at a time so it helps the others to stay calm. We are right next to the RAF Lyneham air base so it dulls the noise from the aircraft as well.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Sean Ragan writes:

This lampshade is made almost entirely from stay tabs that are interlocked together without wires or fasteners of any type, using a kind of "chain mail" technique that I invented. Careful study of the photograph will probably tell you all you need to know about the chaining technique. Each tab is bent to approximately 120 degrees and then snipped at the top. The top loop of the tab is then threaded through the bottom loops of two adjacent tabs on the row above. Rinse and repeat to create mail.  

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Seen here is a Brian McCarty's splendid photograph of Mark Ryden's first ever toy, titled YHWH, on its way this summer from Long Gone John's Necessaries Toy Foundation. The figure stands 16" tall and keeps a constant vigil with its acrylic eyes. Brian's photo will grace the back cover of the forthcoming eleventh issue of Hi-Fructose magazine. Click the image to see it larger.

We've wondered before why mobile operators say they hate the subsidies they pay to discount handset prices, but then expand their use of them to include laptops and netbooks. The trend looks like it's here to stay, as Verizon Wireless has now confirmed it will start selling 3G-equipped netbooks by the end of June, so now, in addition to tying yourself into a 2-year contract where you're paying back the cost of your cell phone, you'll soon be able to tie yourself into a long-term data-service contract to pay back the price of a laptop, too. Of course, once that contract's up, the device will still be locked to the operator from which you bought it, making it difficult (or impossible) to take your business elsewhere. Meanwhile, business is flowing the other direction, too: Dell is reportedly looking to set up a virtual operator in Japan, selling its customers network access on another operator's mobile network to use with their mobile-equipped laptops. It's an interesting contrast in models, because it's unlikely Dell will subsidize the hardware like the operators. Part of the issue with handset subsidies is that consumers are used to paying the lower subsidized prices, and so any change that raises prices will be met with disdain. But people aren't used to the benefit of subsidies for their PCs, so may be more open to paying a higher upfront cost for the hardware if it means they don't have to sign a long-term contract with a high monthly service charge.

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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Snoskred writes with the story of a blogger who chose to remain pseudonymous, who has been outed by an Alaskan politician in his legislative newsletter. Alaska Rep. Mike Doogan had been writing bizarre emails to people who emailed him, and the Alaskan blogger "Mudflats" was one of those who called him on it. (Mudflats first began getting noticed after blogging about Sarah Palin from a local point of view.) Doogan seems to have developed a particular itch to learn who Mudflats is, and he finally found out, though he got her last name wrong, and named her in his official newsletter. The Huffington Post is one of the many outlets writing about the affair. The blogger happens to be Democrat — as is Doogan — but that is immaterial to the question of the right to anonymity in political speech. Does an American have the right to post political opinion online anonymously? May a government official breach that anonymity absent a compelling state interest?

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Dear readers, I owe a review of the finale of Battlestar Galactica, but I'm still thinking about it, and I may have to watch the whole series again, from beginning to end, to be able to write my finale about the finale. Suffice to say that I thought it was great. Not profound, but I don't expect or even want profoundness. I like art, and as art -- BSG was first class. I'll have more to say for sure.

Over the weekend I saw a movie that I really loved, enough to want to call out special attention to it while it's still in the theaters so you can see it. The movie -- Coraline.

The plot is Henry Selick's vision of The Wizard of Oz, which coincidentally I have just seen for the first time since I was a child. Both are stories where the central character is a girl who loses her way from home. Both are children's fantasies, and I'm sure Wizard was a marvel of its time, but what a delicious movie Coraline is, for our time. Every morsel is so detailed and filled with satire and irony, yet still taps into the wonder of the child still within all of us.

If you've seen it, let me know what you think. If you haven't -- hurry -- while it's still in the theaters.

At times, the tech geeks at the NY Times show that they understand what it takes to be a modern online newspaper. At other times... it makes you wonder. Valleywag notes that when the New York Times shut down the International Herald Tribune, which reprinted many nytimes.com stories at their IHT.com website, the NYT pointed every IHT link to a single landing page, rather than properly forwarding them to the proper stories at the NY Times -- effectively breaking tons of useful links online (including plenty right here on Techdirt). For a company that was just among those complaining that Google didn't rank its stories high enough, perhaps the powers that be at the NY Times should take a look at its own policies before whining to Google.

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( Image above: Aaron Muszalski, shot by Scott Beale, at Yuri's night 2007.)

The annual celebration of space travel known as the "Yuri's Night World Space Parties" happens this year on Saturday April 4, 2009.

The events, which take place in cities around the world each April, celebrate humanity's achievements in space. The parties mark the anniversary of cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin's orbital spaceflight, which was the human race's first foray into space (on April 12, 1961) and the first space Shuttle flight (on April 12, 1981). More than 150 events will take place this year on planet Earth.

I co-hosted one of the parties in Dallas, Texas, once, as the pic at left documents. Drunken cosmomauts (no, they were not drinking cosmopolitans) branded me with the head of Yuri Gagarin.

More about the Washington, DC edition of this event, from Yuri's Night global organizer Loretta Hidalgo Whitesides, the lovely and brilliant space diva who will be hosting that particular location's festivities:

The party this year at Goddard features live music from regional music stars Middle Distance Runner. Listen to multi-layered, indie-pop sounds through exploded views of galaxies and NASA exhibits. Dance next to the rocket garden to beats infused by DJ Scientific. A series of activities are guaranteed to entertain including NASA heavy hitters guiding you though space in the Science on a Sphere theater. Galactic attire is encouraged, silver, antennae, glow in the dark, sci-fi. Participants must be at least 21 years old and bring a valid ID. Beer, wine, and refreshments will be available for purchase and water, soda and chips provided.

Food Network will also feature a 2.5 ft high Hubble Space Telescope cake made for the occasion on their TV show 'Ace of Cakes' about Baltimore's own Charm City Cakes bakery and 500 lucky guests will get to sample Charm City's finest as we celebrate Goddard Space Flight Center's 50th Anniversary.

More info on events in all of the participating cities (I believe admission is $10 or less at each) is right here.

Bill Gates, 1994: "The Internet is a great phenomena. I dont see how the emergence of more information content on a network can be a bad thing for the personal computer industry. Will it cause less personal computers to sell? I think quite the opposite. Less copies of Flight Simulator or Encarta?"

PaidContent, 2009: "Microsoft will discontinue both its MSN Encarta reference Web sites as well as its Encarta software, which have both been surpassed by rising competitors, like Wikipedia."

Raul654 writes "In December, we discussed the German Federal Archive's agreement, at the urging of Wikimedia Deutschland, to donate 100,000 pictures to Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license. At the time that was the largest picture donation ever to Wikipedia, and thought to be largest in the history of the free culture movement. Now Wikimedia Deutschland has reached a similar agreement with the Saxon State and University Library, which will donate 250,000 pictures to Wikipedia under CCA-ShareAlike. On a not-unrelated note: Microsoft has announced that it will discontinue its Encarta encyclopedia."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The US Supreme Court has passed on the state of Virginia's appeal to keep its anti-spam law in place. The state's Supreme Court had ruled the law was unconstitutional, following the appeal of a spammer that had been convicted under it. He argued that the law overstepped the boundaries by outlawing non-commercial, as well as commercial spam, including things like political and religious speech that have generally been protected under the First Amendment. By not taking up the case, the high court appears to be extending that protection to cover spam as well. On balance, that's probably a good thing -- particularly as this "loophole" is unlikely to really make the spam problem any worse.

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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In the Make: Online Toolbox, we try to focus on tools that fly under the radar of more conventional tool coverage: in-depth tool-making projects, strange or specialty tools unique to a trade or craft that can be useful elsewhere, tools and techniques you may not know about, but once you do, and incorporate them into your workflow, you'll wonder how you ever lived without them. And, in the spirit of the times, we pay close attention to tools that you can get on the cheap, make yourself, refurbish, etc.

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I did a piece for CRAFT Volume 04, called "What the Hell Is That Thing?" It was inspired by a Fiskars perfing wheel tool that I had. I didn't even know such a thing existed, but I did some garage-duplicated CDs years ago and the musician/graphic artist who was working on the project with me, recommended I get one for perforating the CD tray cards, for easier folding. I've been using it ever since for any sort of folding job. You can get razor cutting and other wheels for it, too.

For years, this tool has sat on the shelf in my office. Several people have spotted it, picked it up, and said: "What the hell is this thing?" So that was the inspiration behind the CRAFT piece, and this installment of Toolbox.

So, what are your "What the hell is this thing" tools? Chime in with Comments.

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This device, called a Resistor Lead Forming Tool, almost went into my previous "Ten tools you won't want to live without" column. And also in "Clamps, Jigs, and Helping Hands." Definitely one of those tools that has a bigger impact on your work than you expect and you do end up wondering why you didn't get one of these in your toolbox sooner. Our pals at EMS Labs sell these in their store for $7.

I love free stuff that comes with your house. This tool was in a kitchen drawer when we bought our place. It's called a Gilhoolie, a tool for opening troublesome bottles and jars. It's never met a lid it couldn't ratchet, grip, and leverage off with aplumb. According to Wikipedia, it was invented by a Dr. C. W. Fuller, a retired dentist from Yonkers, the early 50s.

My friend Claire Carton recommended a bone tool, a simple tool used for cleanly and sharply folding/creasing paper, burnishing material that's been glued, etc. They come in a bunch of different shapes and sizes, but are usually plastic and look sort of like an exceedingly dull letter opener. When I was a graphic artist, I had a boning tool made out of wood, some sort of hardwood, with a smooth, flat diagonal surface on one end and a pin-point on the other (protected by a little cork cap). It was designed for the age of wax galleys (columns of typeset print with wax on the back to adhere to layout board). The flat end was for rubbing the waxed galleys down to the layout board and the pin was used for lifting up the galleys for repositioning. I still have the tool and adore it. The wood is patina'd from years of me handling it. A very simple, seemingly forgettable device that I've used for nearly 30 years. Bone tool. Ancient.

Claire also mentioned a grommet setter. In my CRAFT piece, I talked about the Crop-A-Dile, a bizarre looking device that's a multi-size hole-puncher and grommet-setter. My love for this thing has only grown. We had a couple of these at Maker Faire Bay Area last year, in the Maker's Notebook Modification Station, and people used them to add grommets and punch holes for studs in their books, to bunch holes for ties and snaps, and other creative uses. It's actually strong/sharp enough to easily cut clean holes in the hardboard covers of the Notebooks. This thing usually goes for $25 in a craft store. You can get in through Amazon for $15.

 

If you've ever tried to remove ICs by hand, or with a screwdriver, spudger, or other pry-tool -- chips you want to keep -- you know how easy it is to bend or snap the pins. This little device, the Chip Puller, which comes in many computer repair/electronics toolkits, to the rescue.

MAKE contributor John Baichtal sent us this shot of his nibbler tool. "It's a kind of a die for punching holes in, shaping, and cutting sheet metal."

Make: television producer and MAKE contributing editor Bill Gurstelle loves nibblers too. Here's his ode to them in a Make: television segment.

 

Make: Online and CRAFT contributor Becky Stern writes: I have carpal tunnel syndrome. I got this device, called a Houdini, at a Christmas Yankee swap. I swear it was the best present there! My boyfriend Alex makes fun of me for using it, but it really does make it easier to uncork bottles of wine.

Our Project Editor Paul Spinrad writes: "My sister got me this apple peeler as a gift a few years ago and it's so much fun! I don't use it often, but it's always great to have an excuse to take it off the shelf and press it into service." This device is actually the secret behind the amazing shoestring french fries. Get's some really good, clean russet potatoes, unwind them on this baby, and fry them in fresh, hot peanut oil. Heaven (and heart-quickening salt) await!

Trammel of HacDC writes: My machinist uses a rotary broach to cut hexes on the lathe. It sets up like a normal tool, but off center, and cuts a polygon in a single pass. This gets used all the time in the shop to put hex holes on parts. Slater Tools has a description and nice video showing how it works. You can see an explanation for how it actually works here.

More:

• Toolbox: Soldering station tools and hacks
• Make: Online Toolbox: Jigs, clamps, and helping hands
• Toolbox: Ten tools you won't want to live without
• Toolbox: Benchtop power supplies
• Toolbox: Portable lighting
• Toolbox: Portable workbench
• Toolbox: From "miserable old box" to workshop showpiece

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An anonymous reader writes "In a blog post, Patrick Galbraith, an ex-core engineer on the MySQL Server team, raises the question: "What is the official branch of MySQL?" With Monty Widenius having left Sun and forked off MySQL for MariaDB, and Brian Aker running the Drizzle fork inside of Sun, where is the official MySQL tree? Sun may own the trademark, but it looks like there is doubt as to whether they are still the maintainers of the actual codebase after their $1B acquisition of the code a year ago. Smugmug's Don MacAskhill, who is the keynote at the upcoming MySQL Conference, has commented that he is now using the Percona version of MySQL, and is no longer relying on Sun's."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Richard Metzger is the current Boing Boing guest blogger.

Good Ol' Charlie Brown Timothy Geithner, as illustrated by the inimitable Drew Friedman for the New Republic.

Researchers have built a chip with the equivalent of 200,000 neurons and 50 million synapses in an effort to mimic a human brain in silicon. I, for one, welcome our simple-minded overlords. From Technology Review:

Although the chip has a fraction of the number of neurons or connections found in a brain, its design allows it to be scaled up, says Karlheinz Meier, a physicist at Heidelberg University, in Germany, who has coordinated the Fast Analog Computing with Emergent Transient States project, or FACETS.

The hope is that recreating the structure of the brain in computer form may help to further our understanding of how to develop massively parallel, powerful new computers, says Meier...

FACETS has been tapping into the same databases. "But rather than simulating neurons," says Karlheinz, "we are building them." Using a standard eight-inch silicon wafer, the researchers recreate the neurons and synapses as circuits of transistors and capacitors, designed to produce the same sort of electrical activity as their biological counterparts.

Building A Brain On A Silicon Chip (Thanks, Marina Gorbis!)

Following the recent debates on copyright extension, there's a bit of good news. It appears that the Council of the European Union rejected yet another attempt to extend the copyright on sound recordings from 50 to 95 years. Unfortunately, it doesn't sound like this is (by any means) the end of such proposals. In fact, it's been made clear that this rejection is just a step in the process towards copyright extension. Of course, a bunch of recording industry lobbyists are complaining about how unfair this is, but they fail to explain how it could possibly be seen as fair to retroactively change the deal made with the public to take away the public domain. The entire purpose of copyright is to put in place a limited-time monopoly to act as incentive to create new works. Obviously, that incentive worked, or the content wouldn't have been created. Unfortunately, the recording industry now wants people to believe that copyright is some sort of welfare system for musicians, whereby they should continue getting paid for work they did over 50 years ago. It's a total distortion of the purpose of copyright law -- and one that will cost consumers dearly, and pay musicians little, but enrich the recording industry tremendously. Yet, because of some sob stories about how musicians need this, politicians across Europe have been leaping on board.

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Richard Metzger is the current Boing Boing guest blogger. If you've never heard of Jobriath Boone, don't worry, you're not alone. Obscure even by "rock snob" standards, Jobriath was the first really openly gay rock star. David Bowie and Lou Reed flirted with bisexuality, nail polish and make-up, of course, but Jobriath was in his own words, "a true fairy." He wasn't just "out of the closet" he was out like a police siren with the volume turned up to eleven! I've been a Jobriath freak for about 20 years when I stumbled upon his first LP at a New York City flea market. "What is THIS?" was my initial reaction to the cover, obviously influenced by the artwork for David Bowie's "Diamond Dogs." Clearly from the image on the cover, Jobriath was a 70s glitter rock wannabe. Make that perhaps a "neverwas," for aside from a massive advertising campaign that saw his image on 250 New York buses and a 40 foot high poster in Times Square, two solid LPs (recorded with the likes of Led Zeppelin's John Paul Jones and Peter Frampton) and a memorable "Midnight Special" performance, Jobriath was a massive flop at the time. Too gay for mid-America in 1974? For sure, but that hasn't stopped Jobriath's Broadway showtunes meets glam rock oeuvre from being rediscovered by fresh ears this decade. Championed by Morrissey, Neil Tennant from the Pet Shop Boys and singer-actress Ann Magnuson (who once told me that I was "the only straight guy in the world who's ever even HEARD of Jobriath" back in the early 90s), the tiny cult of Jobriath got a lot of new members when the CD compliation "Lonley Planet Boy" was released in 2004. His life was also a major part of the inspiration for Todd Haynes' "Velvet Goldmine" although few people realize that fact (the Maxwell Demon album covers are direct homages to the original Jobriath records). Admittedly, his music isn't for everyone --some people just HATE it-- but for those of you who embraced the equally obscure Klaus Nomi, you'll probably love Jobriath. "I'maman" on The Midnight Special "Rock of Ages" on The Midnight Special "I'm Ready for my Close-Up" an informative Jobriath article from MOJO. Why You Should Like Jobriath

Ian Lamont writes "IBM has filed a patent application that covers offshoring employees. Application 20090083107, dated March 26, 2009, is a 'method and system for strategic global resource sourcing.' Figure 2 gives a pretty good idea of what's involved — it shows boxes labelled 'Engineer,' 'HR,' and 'Programmer' with crossing arrows pointing to cylinders labelled 'India,' 'China,' and 'Hungary.' The article speculates that IBM may apply the methodology to its own staff — it reportedly plans to lay off thousands of employees and has even started a program to have IBM workers transfer to other countries at local wages."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Dr Pete writes "Financial Times has an interesting piece about Lars Bak and Kasper Lund the authors of the V8 virtual machine in Google's Chrome browser. 'Chrome attracted more than 10 million users in its first 100 days. Although that's an impressive number, it still only translates into about 1 per cent of browser usage online. It will be a while before it can compete with Firefox, Internet Explorer and others. In December last year, Google announced that Chrome was now out of its development, or Beta, phase and is ready to be shipped as a pre-installed browser on some PCs. This could rapidly increase the number of users. Moreover, the European Commission's antitrust battle with Microsoft over, among other things, how its own browser, Internet Explorer, is integrated into its Windows operating system may give competitors such as Google a chance to claim ground.'" Interestingly enough Google Chrome is currently fighting it out with Safari as the #3 web browser on Slashdot.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

JJ sends in the rather amusing news that the TSA's SimpliFLY promotional campaign (which only existed during the 2007 holiday season) may actually violate the trademark of the Salt Lake City International Airport, which uses the term for its telephone help line. From the details, it seems pretty clear this is a pure money grab by the SLC airport, as the marketing director seems quite clear that filing a lawsuit against the TSA was just a way to begin "negotiations." Of course, SLC may find that it has an uphill road to climb, as it needs to explain how the TSA was using the term "in commerce" to show that it's a trademark violation. In the meantime, folks in the marketing department at SLC airport may find that they need to go through a bit of extra scrutiny next time they go through airport security.

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basementman writes "I recently purchased a 10 inch white MSI wind. As you can see it's a small computer and it's good for what I use it for. I get a lot of comments from women saying it is 'cute' or 'adorable.' Not the good kind of cute that will get me the attention I want though, the kind of cute that says they think I have a different presence than I actually want to portray. So how can I make my netbook more manly, or at least have some witty line to respond to the their comments?" Hopefully basementman didn't get a netbook with the hopes of it getting him some action, but what cool mods (or witty one-liners) have others used to salvage their dignity from hardware that is "a good size"?

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Surprised it took this long for someone to do this one (via). #

Google mapp'd locations of those beautiful manhole covers found all over Japan (via). #

A testing tool for web designers that, "tests your website designs across 17 different Windows browsers right from your Mac desktop in seconds." A paid Litmus account is required to fully test all possible browsers, but this looks like a nice alternative to multiple VMs. Auto plug-ins for Coda and TextMate. #

Well, it looks like the ongoing patent battle between TomTom and Microsoft has come to a quick end, with TomTom caving. The company is paying Microsoft to "license" its patents, while dropping its own patent lawsuits against Microsoft. This really isn't too surprising. Microsoft's obviously got plenty of money to spend on just such a legal battle (exactly what the company counts on to get companies to pay up), so at some point, the calculation on TomTom's part has to be whether it's cheaper to fight or to just pay up. In this case (like so many), the company obviously felt it was cheaper to pay up, rather than fight what it believed were highly questionable patents. That's too bad -- but shows just why the patent system is so widely abused. It's almost always cheaper to simply pay up rather than fight -- which is exactly the sort of situation that Microsoft counts on, as it hypes up it's "successful patent licensing program," failing to concede that most of that licensing is done at the end of a large and very pointy stick.

What's still unclear, however, is how this settlement deals with the questions that were raised over GPL'd software used by TomTom. As we noted, the GPL license that covers components of TomTom's software forbid it from putting any restrictions on the distribution of the software. A deal with Microsoft could violate the GPL and cause trouble for TomTom down the road. Perhaps the company is betting that any legal battle on that front would be cheaper than fighting Microsoft's patent lawyers in court.

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Surrounded writes "It appears TomTom bowed to the pressure and settled with Microsoft over the recent patent infringement claims from the Redmond software giant. In the agreement, TomTom will pay Microsoft for coverage under the eight car navigation and file management systems patents in the Microsoft case. Also as part of the agreement, Microsoft receives coverage under the four patents included in the TomTom counter-suit. TomTom also has to remove functionality related to two file management system patents (the 'FAT LFN patents')."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

TechDirt has an interesting look at some of the questions arising about the copyrightability of Twitter messages. I haven't seen any actual copyright lawyers weigh in yet, but it certainly will be interesting to watch the feathers fly until someone nails down the answer. "[...] it seems like there would be two issues here. The first is whether or not the content is covered by copyright — and, for most messages the answer would probably be yes (there would need to be some sort of creative element to the messages to make that happen, so a simple 'hi' or 'thanks' or whatever might not cut it). But, the more important question then would be whether or not ESPN could quote the Twitter message. And, there, the answer is almost certainly, yes, they could, just as they could quote something you wrote in a blog post."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I love this gorgeous set of computer speakers, with masonitecomponents cut out on a laser cutter and veneered. And the B3N drivers he used look sweet.

B3 Mini Array Computer Speakers DIY

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In a five part New York Times online series, documentary filmmaker and blogger Errol Morris tackles the fascinating mystery of this Civil War-era photograph. From the article, titled "Whose Father Was He?:

No name — but a soldier brave, he fell.
We shall find her, without a name;
This picture, sometime, will tell whence he came.
— Emily Latimer, “The Unknown”

The soldier’s body was found near the center of Gettysburg with no identification — no regimental numbers on his cap, no corps badge on his jacket, no letters, no diary. Nothing save for an ambrotype (an early type of photograph popular in the late 1850s and 1860s) of three small children clutched in his hand. Within a few days the ambrotype came into the possession of Benjamin Schriver, a tavern keeper in the small town of Graeffenburg, about 13 miles west of Gettysburg. The details of how Schriver came into possession of the ambrotype have been lost to history. But the rest of the story survives, a story in which this photograph of three small children was used for both good and wicked purposes.

Whose Father Was He? (Part One)

One aspect of Make: Outreach that we're particularly excited about is the Project Pack. As those of you in the maker community know, MAKE magazine and Make: television celebrate the do-it-yourself approach towards technology, and events like Maker Faire and Make: Day present a means of engaging with others interested in doing the same.

But chances are you know someone who looks at all things DIY as unfamiliar, or even daunting and intimidating. This is where the Project Pack comes in handy. You can find it, along with the Outreach Toolkit, by clicking on the Outreach Tools tab at the top of the Make: Outreach website.

The Project Pack is a PDF file containing full instructions for four simple, cost-effective projects, each inspired by a project featured in Make: television's Maker Workshop, and perfect for incorporating the MAKE message into everyday situations.

If you don't have room for a full-sized Portable Trebuchet from Make: television Episode 106, check out the Desktop Trebuchet project in the Project Pack, which uses some pencils, rubber bands, and paper clips.

If you were a fan of the Mini Robots that John Park built in the Maker Workshop on Episode 108 of Make: television, but want to start at the basics of robotics and circuitry, check out the instructions for a Simple Motor.

If you were fascinated by the Cigar Box Guitar from MAKE magazine, Vol 04, or Episode 110 of Make: television but aren't quite ready to hack a tape deck into an amplifier, check out the simple Recycled Instruments project.

All of these projects were designed with the idea that DIY is an empowering process, which will encourage the maker spirit in both experienced makers and those who are building these projects for the first time. Strong partnerships make for great outreach, and the Project Pack is perfect for instructing and inspiring participation in creative activities.

So check it out, and if you build any of the projects, let us know how it went!

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Google is today launching a free, ad-supported music service in China, with the backing of more than 140 record labels, including the Big 4. The service sounds like exactly the sort of thing that people have been calling for since the Napster days: a search engine linked to a trove of music files, supported by advertising. Google's wanted to add some sort of music search to its Chinese product for some time, as it's been at a significant disadvantage to rivals like Baidu, which have the feature to thank for much of their success. The record labels say this is the first attempt to monetize online music in China, and mirrors moves by some movie studios to compete with piracy there with new products and services, rather than through lawsuits and lobbying. These efforts always give a nod to the rampant piracy going on in China -- acting as if it's a completely different environment than the rest of the world. So is the lesson here that only if piracy, or at least the labels' and studios' perceptions of it, gets "bad enough", will they do something positive, rather than sue people or try to get laws strengthened in their favor? Or is it only because those aren't viable options in China that companies try something different there? The fact that the labels are moving forward with this plan in China, given its reputation as the wild west of copyright infringement, undermine their contention that they can solve the supposed piracy problem with legal or technological means elsewhere. Furthermore, it exposes the reality that what's staring them in the face is a tremendous opportunity, not a problem.

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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Writing in the Atlantic, Simon Johnson, former chief economist of the IMF, takes a hard look at the econopocalypse and decides that the root of America's (and Europe's) economic woes is the cozy relationship between super-powerful bankers and government -- oligarchy. So, he says, we cannot fix the economy until we break up the banks, curb executive compensation in the finance sector, and turn it into "just another industry."

Typically, these countries are in a desperate economic situation for one simple reason—the powerful elites within them overreached in good times and took too many risks. Emerging-market governments and their private-sector allies commonly form a tight-knit—and, most of the time, genteel—oligarchy, running the country rather like a profit-seeking company in which they are the controlling shareholders. When a country like Indonesia or South Korea or Russia grows, so do the ambitions of its captains of industry. As masters of their mini-universe, these people make some investments that clearly benefit the broader economy, but they also start making bigger and riskier bets. They reckon—correctly, in most cases—that their political connections will allow them to push onto the government any substantial problems that arise...

The government needs to inspect the balance sheets and identify the banks that cannot survive a severe recession. These banks should face a choice: write down your assets to their true value and raise private capital within 30 days, or be taken over by the government. The government would write down the toxic assets of banks taken into receivership—recognizing reality—and transfer those assets to a separate government entity, which would attempt to salvage whatever value is possible for the taxpayer (as the Resolution Trust Corporation did after the savings-and-loan debacle of the 1980s). The rump banks—cleansed and able to lend safely, and hence trusted again by other lenders and investors—could then be sold off.

Cleaning up the megabanks will be complex. And it will be expensive for the taxpayer; according to the latest IMF numbers, the cleanup of the banking system would probably cost close to $1.5trillion (or 10percent of our GDP) in the long term. But only decisive government action—exposing the full extent of the financial rot and restoring some set of banks to publicly verifiable health—can cure the financial sector as a whole.

This may seem like strong medicine. But in fact, while necessary, it is insufficient. The second problem the U.S. faces—the power of the oligarchy—is just as important as the immediate crisis of lending. And the advice from the IMF on this front would again be simple: break the oligarchy.

The Quiet Coup (via Making Light)