Al writes "A new lithium-ion electrode allows batteries to be charged and discharged in 10 seconds flat. Developed by Gerbrand Ceder, a professor of materials science at MIT, it could be particularly useful where rapid power bursts are needed, such as for hybrid cars, but also for portable electronic devices. In testing, batteries incorporating the electrodes discharged in just 10 seconds. In comparison, the best high-power lithium-ion batteries today discharge in a minute and a half, and conventional lithium-ion batteries, such as those found in laptops, can take hours to discharge. The new high rate electrode, the researchers calculate, would allow a one-liter battery based on the material to deliver 25,000 watts, or enough power for about 20 vacuum cleaners."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google's new Latitude service, which lets people share their location via Google Maps, launched to a lot of coverage last month. There have been plenty of similar services around for a long time, but Latitude got the PR boost the Google brand provides, making it a lot more noticeable than earlier efforts, and it hasn't failed to escape the attention of some British politicians. In an Early Day Motion (described as little more than a way to call attention to pet projects), four members of parliament called for the government there to "examine the privacy implications of Google Latitude and to take action to ensure that Latitude does not represent a privacy threat." Keep in mind that Latitude is an opt-in service, one in which users must actively turn on location-sharing; furthermore, as The Register points out, British mobile phone operators track handset locations and retain the information for a year in case police want the info, which seems to be a bigger privacy issue than the opt-in service. As long as Google clearly explains what Latitude does and how it works, and users must opt-in to the service, it's hard to see how there's much of a privacy problem here. But somehow, it seems that it's publicity, not privacy, the politicians are most interested in.

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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Okay, so maybe this doesn't fall under the "building a better mousetrap" category -- more like "over-building a mousetrap with levels of digital control and electronic actuation that it doesn't really need, but it's a fun project anyway" category.

Arduino Mousecatcher

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Harry writes "I was amused, appalled, and angry — yes, all three — when I spotted signs above every register at my local Office Depot with handy scripts for clerks to use in 'recommending' that customers buy extra-cost, extremely profitable protection plans. And now Laptop Magazine has posted an eye-opening investigative report that charges local Office Depot stores with instructing staffers to lie and tell people who want to buy laptops without service plans that they're out of stock."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

One of the examples I used in the Trent Reznor case study I did was how he sent out a survey to everyone on his mailing list -- but was quite open and honest about doing it -- and he did so in a way that actually made him sound human. Such surveys are a pain in the ass and they certainly annoy some people -- but, as Reznor pointed out in his email, since he and his team are figuring out everything as they go along, it certainly would help to have some info from his fans. We're in something of the same position. We're always working on ways to improve things for our community, as well -- and have a bunch of projects in the works, all focused on helping to reward you, in the community, further. The Insight Community has been quite successful so far, and in 2008 we were able to pay out five figure commissions to our top contributors. What other community are you a member of that pays you for being smart?

Please take a moment to fill out our reader survey.

Like Reznor, it would help if we knew a bit more about you. And, yes, we know that taking surveys is a pain in the ass. And, for those of you who feel that way, please just skip right on over this post and the survey. Sorry for wasting your time. But, for those of you who do feel like a part of the community and wouldn't mind sharing a bit of information that should help us provide more for you in the future, we'd really appreciate it if you could take just a few minutes of your time and fill out the survey. Thanks!

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Patti Schiendelman, Maker Media index, Make: Online contributor, and Genteel Recessionista, posted a piece about using Cat-5 cable to create a garden trellis on her fence. She writes:

Last year I did a webby-looking twine support for my green beans - it worked really well, plus it was entertaining to look at while waiting for the beans to grow. When the season was over and I took down the dead vines, the twine had rotted and came right down, too. This year I decided to make my supports out of wire. I found a bunch of Cat-5 wire at the RE Store; Cat-5 has eight strands of wire (four twisted pairs) in an insulation jacket. I tried the usual wire stripping technique - cutting the circumference of the insulation at intervals and pulling it off the end, like you'd do for a smaller wire - but it didn't work for the group of wires, plus the length was about 65 feet. Kaden suggested I split the insulation lengthwise for about 6 inches, then pull the wires and insulation away from each other - it worked like a charm. It's still hard on the hands, though; I couldn't have done it without wearing my cat-herding gloves.

Garden pea/bean supports

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An anonymous reader writes with an excerpt from Tech Fragments that says "NASA has yet again postponed the launch of Space Shuttle Discovery, which was due to launch today, because of a hydrogen leak in the vent line between the external fuel tank and main engines. The vent line is at the intertank region of the external tank and is the overboard vent to the pad and the flare stack where the vented hydrogen is burned off. ... The NASA launch team is resetting to preserve the option of attempting a Thursday night liftoff at 8:54 p.m. EDT depending on what repairs are needed and what managers decide. The Mission Management Team is meeting at 5 p.m. today to discuss the issue." You can watch for updates on NASA's Space Shuttle page, too.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes with an excerpt from Tech Fragments that says "NASA has yet again postponed the launch of Space Shuttle Discovery, which was due to launch today, because of a hydrogen leak in the vent line between the external fuel tank and main engines. The vent line is at the intertank region of the external tank and is the overboard vent to the pad and the flare stack where the vented hydrogen is burned off. ... The NASA launch team is resetting to preserve the option of attempting a Thursday night liftoff at 8:54 p.m. EDT depending on what repairs are needed and what managers decide. The Mission Management Team is meeting at 5 p.m. today to discuss the issue." You can watch for updates on NASA's Space Shuttle page, too.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Tessie sez, "My husband has a very talented student who in honor of March 10th made Mar10 cookies. She cut out the shapes and frosted them using only a butter knife. She gave 7 different cookies to us and this was just a few of the many she made."

MAR10 cookies (Thanks, Tessie!)

Beth sez, "These are cookies i made, Super Mario, Pac Man and Pokeball cupcakes. It was my solution to 'what do I give my geeky boyfriend who has everything for Valentines?'"

Swoon! Now that's sugary sweet geek-lovin'!

Cookies for my love (Thanks, Beth!)

Marco sez, "I wrote this piece, appearing on McSweeney's today, from the POV of the greatest doctor in the Mushroom Kingdom, Dr. Mario. He's got a lot of ideas on the universal health care crisis, which closely resembles our own."

A government-run plan sounds a lot like what Bowser wants

The king of all Koopas would love to take over every hospital in Mushroom Kingdom, to use them to extract Peach's DNA or create a horrific suit that looks like me to trick the princess. But government-funded doesn't mean government-run. I propose that we set up an oversight committee that would reside on Star World, a place linked to all of our lands. Its doings would be filmed by one of those Lakitu creatures, the sometimes-benevolent Koopas that fly in clouds. This committee would keep watch over the providers. It would see that free Megavitamins were distributed. Finally, it would research new health innovations, such as the powers of the rare Super Mushrooms.

- - - -

Hopefully, I have presented enough facts to explode these common myths. Time is running out, and we're far from a checkpoint. Every major video-game franchise except the Mushroom Kingdom has a system that guarantees health care to its citizens. It should be a major concern that strength in Super Mario Galaxy is gained through the collection of gold coins. We must have free Megavitamins, easier access to refills, and less-time-consuming ways to defeat the viruses. If we stay healthy, we can go on more adventures. And since staying healthy is the ultimate benefit of universal health care, I'll gladly give more of my tax money to the government. No cheat codes necessary.

DR. MARIO WEIGHS IN ON UNIVERSAL HEALTH CARE (Thanks, Marco!)

The Obama administration has named the latest of America's "drug czars" -- the person who heads the War on (Some) Drugs, a futile, expensive and supremely hypocritical campaign that has caused vastly more damage, in America and around the globe, than the problems it aims to fix. No one denies that drug misuse and addiction are often horrific to individuals and their families; what almost no one wants to ask, however, is whether legalization (or at least decriminalization) would have cumulatively less-bad effects. Perhaps the Warriors against (some) drugs -- almost all of whom, no doubt, are users of other drugs -- know that the weight of the evidence would not support their side.

Journalists, who are supposed to critically examine orthodoxy, have been especially cowardly. They won't go near the issue except at the edges, notably when voters in state after state approve "medical marijuana" in the clear realization that the drug-banning forces are cruelly indifferent to some kinds of human suffering that often can be alleviated with a well-filled water pipe.

One traditional journalism organization has been consistently asking the right questions, for several decades now. And the current issue of the Economist again treads confidently and logically where its peers won't begin to venture in this editorial, which begins:

A hundred years ago a group of foreign diplomats gathered in Shanghai for the first-ever international effort to ban trade in a narcotic drug. On February 26th 1909 they agreed to set up the International Opium Commission—just a few decades after Britain had fought a war with China to assert its right to peddle the stuff. Many other bans of mood-altering drugs have followed. In 1998 the UN General Assembly committed member countries to achieving a “drug-free world” and to “eliminating or significantly reducing” the production of opium, cocaine and cannabis by 2008.

That is the kind of promise politicians love to make. It assuages the sense of moral panic that has been the handmaiden of prohibition for a century. It is intended to reassure the parents of teenagers across the world. Yet it is a hugely irresponsible promise, because it cannot be fulfilled.

Next week ministers from around the world gather in Vienna to set international drug policy for the next decade. Like first-world-war generals, many will claim that all that is needed is more of the same. In fact the war on drugs has been a disaster, creating failed states in the developing world even as addiction has flourished in the rich world. By any sensible measure, this 100-year struggle has been illiberal, murderous and pointless. That is why The Economist continues to believe that the least bad policy is to legalise drugs.

Tony Eaton points us to the rather disturbing news that New Zealand's "chief censor" (quite a title, there...), Bill Hastings, is interested in prosecuting parents who have bought their kids violent video games. Apparently parenting is no longer for parents, but for Bill Hastings to determine what is, and what is not appropriate:

"There would certainly be some shock value to prosecuting a parent who gives their under-18 child access to a restricted game. It would send out a message that the enforcement agency means business."

Based on the law, parents prosecuted could face $10,000 fines or be put in jail for three months. Which do you think would do more harm to a child? Playing GTA or having their parent dragged through a show trial, for "shock value," and dumped in jail for three months?

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cooper writes "Heise Open posted news about a bug report for the upcoming Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) which describes a massive data loss problem when using Ext4 (German version): A crash occurring shortly after the KDE 4 desktop files had been loaded results in the loss of all of the data that had been created, including many KDE configuration files." The article mentions that similar losses can come from some other modern filesystems, too. Update: 03/11 21:30 GMT by T : Headline clarified to dispel the impression that this was a fault in Ext4.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

OSCON == Open Source Convention.

Pretty sure I was at the first one, in Monterrey. It was described to me by Tim O'Reilly, who puts it on, as a place where all the open source platforms could come together under one tent. Perl, Python, PHP, Apache and many others.

It's been in Portland for the last few years, and this year it's moving to San Jose.

I had hoped to lead a discussion at this year's OSCON about porting Frontier to Linux. Frontier is the runtime environment that the OPML Editor builds on. It's an object database, scripting language, outline-based editor and database browser, debugger, multi-threaded runtime, verb set, Web CMS, TCP stack, built-in web server. It was the environment that XML-RPC, SOAP, RSS and of course OPML were developed in. All this and the whole download is about 5MB and it installs in a minute. It also has an RSS-based updating mechanism and most updates are "hot" -- meaning you don't even have to relaunch. I love this enviroment, I built it starting in 1988 as the last programming environment I'd use, the one that had everything I wanted, and that's what it is. And because the early development was done so (ahem) early, it was designed to run well on 1Mhz machines with 1MB of memory. As a result it fits really nicely in today's machines.

Now, it runs on Mac and Windows, but I really want it to run on Linux -- so I proposed a session at OSCON to discuss this and see if I couldn't recruit people to work on this. Unfortunately, yesterday I got the rejection email. I kind of expected it, because O'Reilly doesn't seem to like me these days, or whatever -- I don't know and it's not important.

Then someone sent me a pointer to http://opensourcebridge.org/ which is in Portland on June 17-19. Now I have an incentive to see if people want to go there. San Jose is closer to Berkeley, so I'd rather go there, but a really open OSCON would be something that's worth supporting. There are other new projects that don't have space at OSCON, so maybe we could all get together in Portland and see what happens.

Rounding out the musical performances at this weekend's Make: Day will be Tim Kaiser, an awesome Maker who creates music from his own handmade instruments. Tim will have about 15 different instruments and audio fx units along with a small amplifier. He'll also have some simple instruments, parts and piezo-electric pick-ups available to demonstrate basic concepts in building and playing experimental musical instruments.

Tim was also featured in Episode 6 of Make: television.

Make: Day is this Saturday, March 14th from 10am -3pm at the Science Museum of Minnesota!

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Moog has released a Theremin called the Etherwave Plus that can be used to control electronic gear.

Moog Music, the world’s largest manufacturer of Theremins, today began shipping its latest model…the Etherwave Plus. The Etherwave Plus extends the Theremin’s gestural playing technique to the world of analog synthesis and beyond by allowing the user to control gear with a wave of a hand, controlling synthesizers and effects while playing the Theremin. It’s also a stand-alone CV (Control Voltage) controller.

“The Etherwave Plus is our most versatile Theremin yet. It can be played as a normal Theremin, but it really shines in bringing the Theremin’s gestural control interface to synthesizers, effects processors and beyond. There are applications for DJs, singers, guitarists, keyboardists…even dancers,” said Chris Stack, Moog Music Marketing Manager.

Moog Music’s staff has produced a demonstration video to showcase the Etherwave Plus’ capabilities. To see the Etherwave Plus in action visit Moog’s YouTube channel at www.youtube.com/moogmusicinc.

rjshirts writes "In further proof that Planet of the Apes is coming to pass, researchers in Stockholm, Sweden have proof that primates can plan ahead. From the article: 'Santino the chimpanzee's anti-social behavior stunned both visitors and keepers at the Furuvik Zoo but fascinated researchers because it was so carefully prepared. According to a report in the journal Current Biology, the 31-year-old alpha male started building his weapons cache in the morning before the zoo opened, collecting rocks and knocking out disks from concrete boulders inside his enclosure. He waited until around midday before he unleashed a "hailstorm" of rocks against visitors, the study said.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

We’ve rolled out some changes over here at SimpleBits that have been chipped away at for months. Visually, it’s not a drastic difference, but lots of adjustments and polishing were done in other areas. Chunks of copy were chopped, multiple pages combined into one, things simplified. More care and attention was given to the internal layout of pages that aren’t weblog pages. Finally.

Also, the idea of fluid grid layouts has intrigued me since I heard Ethan talk about them at a Markup & Style Society event we threw a year ago. The combination of a rigid design framework, with the fluidity that makes the web unique is a topic I hope wil continue to gain some steam — thanks also in part to Ethan’s recent article over at A List Apart. So, replacing the previous elastic grid (based on ems), is a fluid one. More on that at a later date perhaps.

Meagan helped clean up the new Work section, which quite frankly was a bit of a mess, and she also skinned a new Work Requisition Form that the fine folks at Airbag Industries are letting us kick the tires on. You may remember Greg Storey introducing a new way of communicating with potential clients, and we’re exited to watch it grow over here.

All in all, it’s a continued evolution. That’s what the web in general is, isn’t it? But improvements are improvements, and I’m happy to have things a bit more organized than before.

An anonymous reader writes "Russia's Kremlin-based youth movement Nashi admits being responsible for 2007 cyberattacks against Estonia. An interesting point is that when you DDoS the systems, it's not the fault of some people who want to crash it but instead the systems' for blocking their users due to technical limitations. So if I shot someone to death it's not my fault for shooting them, but theirs instead because of technical limitations of their body."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes "Russia's Kremlin-based youth movement Nashi admits being responsible for 2007 cyberattacks against Estonia. An interesting point is that when you DDoS the systems, it's not the fault of some people who want to crash it but instead the systems' for blocking their users due to technical limitations. So if I shot someone to death it's not my fault for shooting them, but theirs instead because of technical limitations of their body."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Someone who prefers to remain anonymous, sent me a story that I hear all the time these days. He was getting annoyed with not knowing who was calling his Blackberry, so he figured he'd write a simple app to do a standard database lookup in order to pull up the info that would at least let you know where the caller was from, based on area code. It's the sort of thing that software programmers do all the time: see a need, write a simple program to solve it.

Except for the patents.

As he started to write the app, he figured he should take a quick look around to see if anyone else had done so... when he came across the fact that someone had written that app, but thanks to a patent threat, it had been shut down. In fact, the patent holder, Cequent, has sued a few others who dared to create such a simple database lookup app themselves. The patent itself describes an incredibly simple database lookup... yet, now no one else is allowed to create such an app.

The purpose of the patent system was to create the incentives for inventors to invent products that likely would not have been created otherwise, in order to help "promote the progress." Yet, when it's being used to prevent an engineer from writing a simple app that could have occurred to anyone, based on a simple database lookup, doesn't it seem like there's a pretty big problem?

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Jack Spine writes "The inventor of the World Wide Web has pointed out some of the dangers of deep packet inspection. Sir Tim said that ISPs 'snooping' on data was similar to the interception of mail. 'This is very important to me, as what is at stake is the integrity of the internet as a communications medium,' Berners-Lee said on Wednesday. TBL's comments come as the UK government is gearing up to intercept all web communications in the UK through the Intercept Modernisation Programme, and echo comments he made last year about Phorm."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Jack Spine writes "The inventor of the World Wide Web has pointed out some of the dangers of deep packet inspection. Sir Tim said that ISPs 'snooping' on data was similar to the interception of mail. 'This is very important to me, as what is at stake is the integrity of the internet as a communications medium,' Berners-Lee said on Wednesday. TBL's comments come as the UK government is gearing up to intercept all web communications in the UK through the Intercept Modernisation Programme, and echo comments he made last year about Phorm."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Glyn sez, "With the European Parliament set to vote on 23 March on extending the term of copyright for sound recordings, please write to your MEPs now urging them to vote against this measure. Your MEPs need to know that their voters are concerned and paying attention - use the Open Rights Group guide to lobbying your MEPs (click to download) and a briefing pack (click to download).

"I can't overstate it: get in touch with your MEPs now and use the new banners and buttons to spread the word.

"Key European experts opposing the extension have released a new letter to MEPs warning of the dangers. Highlighting that the costs to the public are likely to exceed &Euro;1 billion the academics warn:"

If Europe wishes to keep its ability to innovate, it must not lock in the current industry structure at a moment of great technological change, it must not inhibit digital creators and archives in the exploration of music - music which has been paid for once already, during the existing term!

The public will not be fooled. If copyright law, cynically, departs from its purpose, piracy becomes an easy option.

We urge the European Parliament, and the governments of member states of the European Union, to consider carefully the independent evidence on copyright term extension, and reject the Directive in its proposed form.

Copyright Term (Thanks, Glyn!)

Here's a nice roundup of photos of open sewers from around the world -- it's over a year old, but I don't think there've been a lot of advances in open sewer technology in the past 14 months.

Open Sewers Of The World (Thanks, Icky Bob!)

(Image: The Hindu)

Farhad sez, "This guy used Google Sketchup to show what $1 trillion actually looks like. It's big!"

Those are bales of $100 bills, incidentally.

What does one TRILLION dollars look like? (Thanks, Farhad!)

Last week, I had the happy privilege of being the latest speaker in the ongoing "Meet the Media Guru" series in Milan, Italy. It was a stupendous couple of days, with a day and a half of intensive meetings and interviews with bloggers and journalists, and a sold-out, standing room only speech at the end. The MMG people were absolutely fantastic -- here's a picture of me with Maria Grazia, the founder of the series -- but I'd be remiss if I didn't also thank Lucia and Lucio and all the rest of the people who were so kind, thoughtful and fascinating.

The event's organizers have posted video of the talk, as well.

Video, Photo gallery

Even without the audio, Christopher Schmitt's presentation slides give a nice overview of HTML5 with comparison code examples, etc. #

Sadly, I don't think I'll ever earn my Inbox Zero badge. #

Derek Bledsoe, Boing Boing Video producer, is blogging daily Boing Boing Video episodes while Xeni's on the road in Africa.

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A disclaimer for the capitalist entertainment pellet above: This is a paid ad for Cheetos. This is also the 6th and final security bulletin from the long-lost Communist enclave of Soviet Unterzoegersdorf. This ad allows Boing Boing Video to post all remaining content ad-free.

IN THIS EPISODE:

We proclaim victory over the extremist political enclave Soviet Unterzoegersdorf with this transmission, in which they announce their final protest against the "golden showers" of liberalism and threaten to take their plight to the United Nations.

IN COMPLETELY UNRELATED NEWS:

Ze good fellows at monochrom have developed a proletarian adventure game: Soviet Unterzogersdorf in which "a fictitious and misplaced handling of the past and present is put to use as a criticism of culture and collective memories."

Hmm... good bye FPSs, time for a does of meta-cultural exploration.

Previously:

• BB Video: Soviet Unterzoegersdorf, pt. 1 of 6 / Cheetos Boredom ...
• BB Video: Soviet Unterzoegersdorf, pt. 2 of 6 / Cheetos Boredom ...
• BB Video: Soviet Unterzoegersdorf, pt. 3 of 6 / Cheetos Boredom ...
• BB Video: Soviet Unterzoegersdorf, pt. 4 of 6 / Cheetos Boredom ...
• BB Video: Soviet Unterzoegersdorf, pt. 5 of 6 / Cheetos Boredom ...

Flash video embed above, click "full" icon inside the player to view it large. You can download the MP4 here. Our YouTube channel is here, you can subscribe to our daily video podcast on iTunes here. Get Twitter updates every time there's a new ep by following @boingboingvideo, and here are the archives for Boing Boing Video.

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(Special thanks to Boing Boing Video's hosting and publishing provider Episodic.)

SkiifGeek writes "With Adobe's patch for the JBIG2Decode vulnerability due in a few days time, new methods to target the vulnerability have been discovered that make it far riskier than previously thought. Didier Stevens recently showed the world how it is possible to exploit the vulnerability without the user actually opening an affected file, and now he has discovered a way that allows for completely automated exploitation that results in anything up to a Local System account without any user interaction at all and only relies upon basic Windows components and Acrobat Reader elements. There are some mitigating factors that limit the overall risk of this new discovery, but it does also highlight that merely uninstalling the Reader will not protect you from exploitation and does raise the possibility that other tools will access the vulnerable components and thus be vectors for attack." However, the fix is now in: nk497 writes "Adobe had finally released a fix for a PDF vulnerability discovered — and already exploited — last month. The update only applies to the most recent versions of Reader and Acrobat, with early versions and Unix editions not fixed until later this month. Adobe has taken its time with the patch, despite an independent security researcher releasing her own fix just days after the flaw was announced."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

There are an awful lot of problems with red light cameras -- starting with the fact that they don't actually decrease accidents or make the roads any safer. Most evidence suggests the only thing they're really good for is increasing the revenue for a city -- which is why a bunch of cities have broken the laws over the years and shortened the length of the yellow light to "catch" more red light runners -- while also actively ignoring any actual data around the cameras. Reader Gabriel Tane points us to a newly proposed law in Florida for red light cameras that, on top of everything else, would automatically fine the owner of the car even if he or she wasn't driving. It's difficult to see how this is reasonable... unless of course this law has nothing to do with making drivers safer, and is, instead, a way to raise extra money for a city.

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stoolpigeon writes "My past as a DBA probably makes me a bit biased, but the reaction I've seen the most when a database application isn't performing as well as would be liked seems to focus on the database side of things. The search for a solution usually seems to center around tuning db parameters, the building (or removal) of indexes and, if the budget allows, throwing hardware at the problem. In their new work, Refactoring SQL Applications, Faroult and L'Hermite bring a much wider range of options to the table. There is a lot in this little book for the developer charged with fixing an existing application and I think a lot of good information that could save one from making a number of headache-inducing mistakes on a new application." Keep reading for the rest of JR's review.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The decision earlier this week by Google to block music videos in the UK has certainly kicked off quite the firestorm of discussions within the music industry -- and an awful lot of whining about how it's "just not fair." Not surprisingly, the PRS folks have dragged out some musicians to kick and scream about how Google makes sooooooo much money, so why aren't they sharing? It's the same economically clueless argument that the newspapers have been using against Google. However, as Google pointed out, they are looking to share. The offer they made to PRS was to give them a significant portion of whatever ad revenue can be generated on those videos. PRS wants more than that, such that every music play would cost Google significantly more than it made.

It is, perhaps, no surprise at all, that one of the major complainers on the musician side is Billy Bragg -- who's been quick to make these sorts of ridiculous arguments in the past as well, and whose manager, Peter Jenner, is equally unable to understand basic economics. The problem is that they think that the world owes them money after the fact. They both refuse to come up with decent business models, and then complain when others do -- and demand that those other innovators simply have to pay up.

It's the same story we hear over and over again. Folks in the entertainment industry insist that 100% (or perhaps 99%) of the value comes from the content itself -- and refuse to recognize that any of the value comes from the technology, the service or the community of folks using those services. However, their own actions show how wrong that is. If it's true that Google is "underpaying" the artists, shouldn't the artists be HAPPY that Google took down their content? After all, according to what some of these artists and record labels insist, wasn't Google "stealing" from them? So, now that Google has stopped, doesn't that mean they're better off?

No?

The very fact that the musicians are so up in arms shows how much more leverage Google has. It shows that a significant part of the value is in YouTube. YouTube can survive just fine without the music videos. The musicians, on the other hand, are suffering. That's why it's the musicians complaining. But that shows the very point Google is trying to make: Google has the leverage here, not the musicians. And, yet, the musicians still want to pretend it's the other way around.

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Eric says: "I just took this photo on the corner of Broad and Beaver Streets in FiDi, NYC. I am alarmed to consider what might be on the bill-of-fare if this is a delivery vehicle."

Staff at Corpus Christi State School, a home for mentally disabled people, were suspended for organizing a "fight club" involving the folks who lived there. The workers will likely be charged with abuse. From the Associated Press:

Corpus Christi Police Captain Tim Wilson says the fight clubs were uncovered when someone gave an off-duty police officer a cell phone containing videos of fights at the Corpus Christi State School.

Wilson says the videos show mentally disabled adult clients punching, shoving, and striking each other while the employees watch.

`Fight club' bouts probed at home for the retarded (Thanks, Gil Kaufman!)

Late last year, just before Bank of America closed a deal to buy a failing Merrill Lynch, the BoA's executives signed off on $4 billion in bonus payments to Merrill Lynch executives and senior employees. This, after we taxpayers had poured more than $45 billion into saving these incompetent and/or corrupt people from their financial follies.

Merrill and BoA have done their best to stonewall the public from learning any details about this sleaze, including some very suspicious timing. And these bonuses were only a relatively small portion of the overall shower of cash that rained on people in an industry that did more to ruin our economy than any crew since the 1920s.

One of my projects keeps its money at Bank of America. I want to move the money to a bank that behaves more honorably. This isn't just a moral issue, but also a financial one. An institution that behaves the way BoA has done in this situation, among many others, can't be trusted.

It's not just a business account that I want to put in an institution that I have more reason to trust. I'm also looking for such a place to put my own personal accounts, which are currently at Citibank, an institution with less-than-zero credibility at this point.

I'm looking for ideas on a) what constitutes an honest bank; and b, if such an entity exists, what specific services (such as electronic transfers and bill payments) are bottom-line requirements.

Thoughts? Suggestions?

A new URL shortener.

http://tinyarro.ws/

Ho hum.

No -- it's interesting -- seriously.

The URLs are weird. Are they shorter? Not sure.

The web used to be full of weird ideas that stretched your mind.

Not so much these days.

This is one of them.

Let me know what you think!!

PS: Wish I had thought of it.

chareverie writes "The Prime Minister of the UK is being urged to impose high taxes on violent video games in an effort to reduce the number of knife-related crime. The request comes from Richard Taylor, who argues that young people 'feel that the law has no control over them. They just feel that they can go on the streets and do whatever they like.' He doesn't have a definitive number on how much to tax on the offensive video games, but says that they should be 'very high.' Rap music is also voiced to be a concern due to the alleged negativity and language. Taylor's son, Damilola Taylor, was killed in November 2000 at the age of 10 by knife stabbing."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This unusual egg emerged from a chicken kept at the home of Natalie Wiltshire of Willoughby, Northamptonshire, England. From Metro:

'It really is quite an extraordinary shape. All I need now is another nine pins and a round one for a bowling ball and we have the complete set,' she joked.

"Chicken lays bowling-pin shaped egg"

Just posted! Our latest lens review focusing on Sigma's 10-20mm F4-5.6 EX DC HSM ultra-wideangle zoom. A firm favourite with the more budget-conscious APS-C user since its introduction four years ago, this lens is now challenged by some new young pretenders intent on stealing its market share. So can this old warrior still fight off its challengers, or is age beginning to take its toll?

So much time at your desk, so much raw material in the office supply room. What to do? Make monitor juju, decorate your geekosphere, construct marvelous models that'll delight and confound your coworkers. Here are a few of our favorite projects we've run into over the years for turning office (and corner coffee shop) supplies into ingenious little display models.

And if you're in an office setting and you get caught building a space ship on your desktop, tell your boss that studies have shown that doodling, freeform thinking, and working puzzles and tactile toys on the job actual improve creative problem solving. So, you're not actually goofing off, you're working up to your next big idea!

This amazing Mario Cart was built by Flickr member Donald Kennedy, aka ekoala. It's made out of colored paper clips, binding clips, push pins, and loose change. See the rest of his Flickr pics here and see more projects on his website KodyKoala.

This original series Star Trek Enterprise model has become something of an iconic representation of brilliant workplace makery. Couple of binder clips, an old CD, a couple of ink pens, and you're ready to warp out of mundane reality to boldly go... okay, you won't really be going anywhere, but you can pretend all you like. The bottom of the two was built by someone who followed the original Instructable and improved upon it. The bridge dome on the saucer was made by forming some wax into the bottom of a wine glass.

Here's another version of the Enterprise, with removable saucer section, made from a wall clip, binder clip, and some tape. Instructions here.

Wired magazine photographer Dan Winters created this stunning Star Wars Tie Fighter model out of Starbucks cups, cup insulation jackets and coffee stirrers. This thing looks like in came out of a Hollywood prop shop.

On Deviant Art, papercrafter Tom Cockeram offers a template for making these Muskins and then shows dozens of variations on the model.

Tom Cockeram has plans for other papercraft projects, like this Trevor robot, on his website.

Papercrafting is a really fun kill-time activity and there are hundreds of free papercraft models and instructions available online. Just Google the word "papercraft" and you'll scoop up dozens of great sites like Sci Fi Paper Craft, devoted to amazingly-detailed sci-fi paper models.

[Paper models available on Sci Fi Paper Craft Gallery]

On many papercraft project sites, you just download a PDF with instructions and colored templates for the models, print, on paper or card stock, grab your scissors and white glue, and you've got hours of tedious cutting, folding, and gluing fun ahead of you. Tip: Rubber bands and binder clips make great clamps to hold parts together while gluing.

And if you really have some idle time on your hands, and 25 sheets of 4 x 8 single-ply cardboard, you can construct a 17' tall model of Gandhi!

---

Editor's note: We're extremely pleased that Cheetos is a sponsor on MAKE! Each week we have a fun "Take a Break with Cheetos" sponsored post for part of the day, only the links below are part of the campaign - we're having fun with this! This week was fun with office supply model-making. - Gareth

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This striking "Ruby" rocking chair from Pouyan Mokhtarani is modelled on human anatomy. The manufacturer makes a bunch of crazy newage claims about the benefits of this ("This chair is designed in a way that when ever an individual sits on it, he or she will experience the sense of power. This feeling is synonymous to that of a super metaphysic human who can control every surrounding matter.") but I like it because it just Looks Cool; it's entirely conceivable that sitting in it is like being beaten with sticks.

Not Your Grandma’s Rocking Chair

Having too much fun playing Tetris? Why not suck all the enjoyment out of it by playing it in HD?

High-Rez Tetris (via Kottke)

I don't drink wine, I don't have a cellar -- or even dirt under my flat to install a cellar in -- but man, this is one freakishly desirable batcave/staircase thinggum.

Ever want a wine cellar but don’t have the space or money to build one? The Spiral Cellars design/build firm will dig a hole right in whatever room you want your cellar in and haul the dirt right out the front door. In the remaining void they infill a highly functionally and visually dazzling spiral-staircase wine cellar to fit all your favorite vintages and go with your favorite funky furniture designs.

Wonderful Wine Cellars For Any Room in Your House (Thanks, Steve!)

je ne sais quoi writes "The Apple rumor mill is churning today. Reuters and the DOW Jones news wire are reporting that an anonymous source in Taiwan has leaked that Apple has ordered some 10-inch touch-screens from WinTek, the maker of the touch-screen for the iPhone. It looks like an Apple netbook could possibly be in the works for a delivery date in Q3 of this year, in time for back-to-school sales. CNET and Engadget have completely unsubstantiated mock-ups."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Things aren't looking good for the online ad market: reduced spending by advertisers combined with the fact that people don't pay a whole lot of attention to banner ads portends doom and gloom. While the first part of that equation might be out of online publishers' control, they're trying to tackle the second part not by recognizing that advertising needs to be engaging or interesting content in order to be satisfying, but rather by clubbing internet users over the head with some new, huge and intrusive banner ad formats. Say hello to the Fixed Panel, which is a huge vertical banner that "scrolls to the top and bottom of the page as a user scrolls", the XXL Box, which is pretty much exactly what it says, and the Pushdown, the biggest of the bunch, which rolls down from the top of the page to get right in the user's face. The trade group behind these new formats says they are "designed to help stimulate a renaissance of creative advertising on the Internet that meets the needs of marketers by better integrating their messages into the fabric of the Web." That sounds like a lot of buzzwords, but conspicuous by its absence is any mention of the user's experience of these ads. These ads might grab users' attention through brute force, but will the experience be a positive one? It seems likely that intrusive advertising that gets in users' way will simply make the current situation worse by driving users away from the content. This is a further reflection of just how dead the captive advertising model is. Consumers have plenty of choices about where to get their content online; if a publishers' advertising keeps getting in their way, they'll move on and get content from somewhere else.

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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From the MAKE Flickr pool

Solipsistnation posted detailed info for the excellent MeggySeq project (we recently covered) -

MeggySeq has 8 patterns of 16 steps each. You can set each of those steps to play one of 8 WAV files on the waveshield. You can play the pattern back, stop it playing, and change the tempo. You can copy patterns from one slot to another. You can even save all 8 patterns from RAM to EEPROM so they won't be lost when you turn off the Meggy Jr.

You can loop patterns into longer compositions (up to 8 patterns long) and edit the patterns and pattern parameters (like tempo, loop length, and pattern length) without stopping playback.

You can edit one pattern while another is playing, and if you change patterns during playback, the first pattern will finish playing before jumping to the newly-selected pattern (or the next pattern in the loop if you've turned on looping).

As he goes on to mention, Meggy Jr. isn't used for sound output in the project, but instead acts as a step sequencer triggering sample playback on a seperate Arduino + WaveShield unit. Over a serial cable, Meggy sends the numbers 1-8 corresponding to .wav filenames on the shield's SD card. This could easily be used for a live gig - nicely bright and blinky for low-light venues. Get down with all relevant source code & instructions on Solipsism.net

In the Maker Shed:

Arduino WaveShield Kit

Meggy Jr. RGB Kit

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Hugh Pickens writes "Jonathan Berger, a professor of music at Stanford, tests his incoming students each year by having them listen to a variety of recordings which use different formats from MP3 to ones of much higher quality, and he reports that each year the preference for music in MP3 format rises. Berger says that young people seemed to prefer 'sizzle sounds' that MP3s bring to music because it is a sound they are familiar with. 'The music examples included both orchestral, jazz and rock music. When I first did this I was expecting to hear preferences for uncompressed audio and expecting to see MP3 (at 128, 160 and 192 bit rates) well below other methods (including a proprietary wavelet-based approach and AAC),' writes Berger. 'To my surprise, in the rock examples the MP3 at 128 was preferred. I repeated the experiment over 6 years and found the preference for MP3 — particularly in music with high energy (cymbal crashes, brass hits, etc) rising over time.' Dale Dougherty writes that the context of the music changes our perception of the sound, particularly when it's so obviously and immediately shared by others. 'All that sizzle is a cultural artifact and a tie that binds us. It's mostly invisible to us but it is something future generations looking back might find curious because these preferences won't be obvious to them.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Olympus has announced a firmware update for the Zuiko Digital ED 9-18mm F4.0-5.6 super wide-angle lens. Version 1.1 improves the auto-focusing ability of this E-system lens in certain conditions. Olympus DSLR owners can update the firmware using the software supplied with their cameras, whereas Panasonic users can download a firmware update program from Olympus’s website.

Here are some rad results from the Core77 green sled design challenge, now an annual event. I was happy to see the riders wearing helmets on some of the more ambitious designs.

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WSJdpatton writes "The collision between two satellites last month has renewed interest in some ideas for cleaning up the cloud of debris circling the earth. Some of the plans being considered: Using aging rockets loaded with water to dislodge the debris from orbit so it will burn up in the atmosphere; junk-zapping lasers; and garbage-collecting rockets."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Make: television is honored to welcome the sounds of Keston and Westdal to Make: Day. Their approach involves improvising the arrangements and musical content by combining traditional and nontraditional methods. John Keston is one half of the band and the founder of Audio Cookbook, an awesome resource for sound designers, artists, and anyone who loves to play with sound. We asked John to say more about Keston and Westdal.

Keston and Westdal have been producing and performing since 2000. With help from drummer Joshua Herbst, they roused six thousand music lovers at the Montreal Jazz Festival in July, 2004. As well as performing in prominent venues around the US and Canada, the duo has released three full-length albums, been reviewed in magazines including Signal to Noise, URB, Keyboard, The Book LA, and Minnesota Monthly. They have also been reviewed on dozens of music sites like ScissorKick.com, ProperlyChilled.com, and CalmScape.com.

You may remember John Keston's experiments with sound editing using Photoshop.

www.kestwest.com
Keston and Westdal (MySpace)

Make: Day is this Saturday, March 14th from 10am -3pm at the Science Museum of Minnesota!

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Even with cutbacks, you have to hand it to entertainment industry lobbyists who are able to push through similar legislation around the world. The latest is that South Korea is joining the ranks of countries like New Zealand and France in pushing for a "three strikes" rule that would kick users off the internet after being accused (not found guilty) of unauthorized file sharing. Notice how this works, of course. Just last week, New Zealand officials were defending this plan by saying they were only doing what plenty of other countries had already done (which isn't true, since no one has made such a plan into law yet). But, by getting many countries to introduce vaguely similar laws, everyone can just claim "oh look, it's what country X is doing, and we need to do the same thing to stay current." It's how the entertainment industry has forced legal changes world wide for years.

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Last week, I gave a talk in Milan and had the immense pleasure of sitting down to lunch with Davide Casaleggio and his colleagues, who work with provocateur, dissident and comedian Beppe Grillo on issues related to social justice and media in Italy. Now Davide sends along this call-to-action for bloggers around the world to help fight an initiative to force Italian bloggers to be licensed by the state:

In the last five months the Italian Parliament has accelerated the legislation against the Internet. Probably because it's the last media that is out of control in Italy after out of seven National TV's 3 are owned by the Prime Minister, 3 are State owned and controlled by the Government (read: Prime Minister), and all major newspapers are financed by the State.

Two million people are going to be unemployed within just one year in Italy. Yet our very own little Marie Antoniettes, firstly Levi (left wing) then Cassinelli (right wing) then D'Alia (center) now Carlucci (right wing) have nothing better to do than work day and night, PAID FOR BY US, in an attempt to gag the Web.

Just when Levi stated that he had withdrawn his blog killer proposal, asking all bloggers to register with the Government if they gain profit (e.g. adsense), along comes Cassinelli with a new blog screwer law. The difference between the two is significant. If it is true that Levi was attempting to kill the bloggers, then Cassinelli first screws them, making as if he is trying to help them and then he kills them having the same objective: get bloggers to register with the Government.

Then Senator D'Alia comes along wanting to black out the Internet. He has proposed an amendment, that has been approved in the Senate, to a draft law put forward by Minister Brunetta, that will oblige the ISPs to black out a site, a blog or a social media like YouTube or Facebook (the whole site) at the request of the Minister of the Interior for crimes of opinion, for example a film clip or a group that invites people not to observe a law that is considered to be unjust. Without any verdict from a magistrate. Today, this only happens in China. In a dictatorship.

Now Carlucci, ex show girl now member of Parliament for the right wing, is proposing to a law to forbid to publish any content in any form on line anonymously.

Tens of thousands have already wrote to the Parliamentarians and often they thought twice before going on. Today though we want to tell all of them that that is enough, to keep their hands off the Internet, to keep bloggers free. Help the Italian bloggers! Let them see that we all want to remain free bloggers.

Send in your photos with the words: "FREE BLOGGER"

Send an email to freeblogger@beppegrillo.it with:
- subject: your name
- text: the address of your blog
- attached: a photo of you with a sign saying "FREE BLOGGER"

You'll see it among the two thousand already arrived.

Thank you for your support,
Beppe Grillo

brumgrunt writes "Dollhouse. The Sarah Connor Chronicles. Fringe. Three science fiction shows that Fox commissioned, put on the air, and — in the case of at least one of them — has won rave reviews. But why does it seem that Fox is trying to kill some of its own shows with crazy scheduling decisions? How can Fringe survive after being pulled for two months, and what hope is there for Sarah Connor and Dollhouse on a Friday night?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Harvard Berkman Center for Internet & Society's new Media Cloud

is a system that lets you see the flow of the media. The Internet is fundamentally altering the way that news is produced and distributed, but there are few comprehensive approaches to understanding the nature of these changes. Media Cloud automatically builds an archive of news stories and blog posts from the web, applies language processing, and gives you ways to analyze and visualize the data. The system is still in early development, but we invite you to explore our current data and suggest research ideas. This is an open-source project, and we will be releasing all of the code soon. You can read more background on the project or just get started below.

(Note: I'm a Berkman Fellow, but I'd highlight this even if I wasn't. This is an important project for helping us understand what's going on in media.)

superglaze (ZDNet UK) writes "Google is gearing up to launch cookie-based 'interest-based' advertising, which involves monitoring the user's passage across various WebSense partner sites. The idea is to have better-targeted advertising, which is not a million miles away from what Phorm is trying to do — the difference, it seems at first glance, is that Google is being relatively upfront about its intentions."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

• Apple released a new iPod. Isn't it a beauty? But note the proprietary headphones.
• Shamwow illustrates the human condition.
• Laptop Lifts help keep cool air flowing around your crotch baker.
• Behold! Black iPig.
• French gadget bags are pretty.
• Make your own networked scanner rig.
• Four year-old Billy controls his PC with SmartNAV.
• Office Depot salespeople are trained to lie, reports Laptop Mag.
• Appstore crisis! Twitter app banned and reinstated. Apple's policies rise and set with sun.
• Londoners also love GPS tracking.
• Find your lost gadgets with EZ-Find. Flaw: you have to know you're going to lose them first.
• The EKS Otis DJ controller is ugly and has lots of knobs. It's perfect.
• New shopping bags biodegrade so quickly you have to shop faster.
• Joel bought a saw because the company's logo was in a nice font.
• Ikea shows us how to disassemble, package and ship babies.
• Airwolf fought Firefox.
• There is Star Trek cologne. It's apparently quite drinkable.

A bunch of folks have been sending in the wonderful news that the Guardian, in the UK, has opened up an API and is sharing data in such a way that others can build programs on top of the news. This is fantastic -- and follows on a similar move last month by the NY Times. It appears that both the NY Times and the Guardian really are pushing the boundaries of recognizing that being an online newspaper these days needs to be about a lot more than delivering the news.

Perhaps even more interesting (though, getting much less attention) is the companion bit of news from some editors at the Guardian -- who are pointing out that they hope and pray each day that the NY Times gives into temptation and starts trying to charge for news... because it will create a huge opening for the Guardian to create a much larger online audience. This is what plenty of people have been pointing out for years: if clueless newspaper execs decide to start charging for news, it just opens the door wide for smarter news organizations to stay free and accumulate a much larger audience.

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From MAKE subscriber Justin Shaw comes the UberLight - a dual LED matrix bicycle turn signal an brake light. An interesting design using accelerometer to determine braking, plus basic switches for indicating turns. The project uses an Arduino in combination with a couple of serial-controlled red/green matrices. Riding with this setup should get some much-needed attention from nighttime drivers. For more info, check out the schematic and source code.

In the Maker Shed: ProtoShield for Arduino Kit

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bowman9991 writes "Bryan Fuller, creator of the TV show Pushing Daisies and a former Star Trek writer and producer, is geared up to make it happen. The new Star Trek TV show would be based on "old style" Star Trek, rather than the more recent incarnations and variations: Deep Space Nine, Voyager, Enterprise and Star Trek: The Next Generation. There hasn't been a Star Trek TV series since Enterprise was canceled after four seasons in 2005. Fuller wrote twenty one Star Trek episodes over four years, two in Deep Space Nine's final season, and the rest for Voyager. He also produced Voyager's last season. If J.J. Abrams' reboot is successful (and the latest trailer suggests it will be!) perhaps we'll see him involved with a new Star Trek TV show with the style and impact of Fringe or Lost. The new Star Trek movie featuring a young Kirk and Spock is in cinemas May 2009." Besides his work on many episodes of Trek, Fuller's work includes Dead Like Me and some of the best of Heroes (He's one of the names I actively seek in the writing slot) Between him and JJ Abrams, the era of Rick Berman looks to finally be at an end. Cross your fingers.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I love all of the amazing boards, Shields, kits and other Arduino components and accessories that people dream up. Here's a laser-cut control panel board/stand that Blushing Boy is giving away when you buy one of their Smapler-v0002 + ARDUINO Diecimila Kit (for ten buyers).

Snap-on Design for Arduino boards

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Julie188 writes "When the Android Market began offering paid apps last month, developers with the unlocked version of Google's Android phone quickly learned that they couldn't access them. The policy, which threatened to alienate the small developer base that Google needs to nurture at all costs, didn't make much sense. And now, with the release of Version 1.1 of Android for the developer phone, developers can access paid apps — as long as they aren't copy-protected. But in a weird way, that's good news. Very few developers currently copy-protect their Android apps simply because Android's copy-protection scheme is notoriously weak."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

MAKE subscriber mtbf0 used a MiniPOV kit to create this rather sweet UV printer -

This is a video of a phosphorescent text display that needs a name. It's a minipov3 board with uv leds. It has a built-in 5x7 font and room for over 900 characters of display text. When passed over a phosphorescent surface it deposits glowing strings of text which then, slowly, fade away. The firmware provides simple examples of the use a timer interrupt and powersaving features on an attiny2313.

Hmmm … UVPOV? … miniPOP(persistence of phosphorescence)? POGlow? Whatever it ends up being named, it would likely make for intriguing art installation - the fading text adds a somewhat eerie 'living' quality to the message. The AVR source is available for download from Google Code.

In the Maker Shed: MiniPOV kit

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We want to learn more about you. Yes, you! So if you have 5 minutes, and like the idea of contest, take a look at this survey. You could win 1 of 5 Maker's Notebooks that we are giving away, at random, to people who take the Maker Shed survey.

We ask for your email information at the conclusion of this survey for one reason: to allow you to enter yourself in a random drawing for gifts. Providing your email is strictly optional. Other than that, we do not ask any personally identifiable information, nor will we sell, rent or share your email address to third parties.

Want to make us really happy? If you win one of the Maker's Notebooks be sure to mod it up a bit and send us a link. We love to post about customized Maker's Notebooks.

Take the Maker Shed survey!

In the Maker Shed:

 

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

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Earlier this year, we noted that the judges in East Texas were actually transferring some patent lawsuits out of the court, following a ruling from a year ago at the appeals court level (CAFC) telling the district courts to move cases to where they were more "convenient." For a few months, however, various patent attorneys have been saying to keep watching, and that the folks in East Texas, who know they have a good thing going, will come up with ways to keep more cases in their favorite courthouse. And... that appears to be happening. In a few recent rulings in Marshall, Texas, Judge Ward has denied attempts to move the cases to more convenient locations, sometimes challenging the question of whether or not they really were more convenient -- but the reasoning doesn't pass the sniff test.

In a case brought by a patent holder named MHL Tek, who is based in Michigan, against something around a dozen auto manufacturers, Judge Ward denied the transfer, saying that with so many different parties, it made no sense to claim that Michigan (the requested transfer site) was somehow more convenient:

"With regard to defendants, four defendants reside in Germany, three in California, two in Japan, two in South Korea, two in New Jersey, one each in Michigan, Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, Indiana, and Virginia. The Court finds that this district would, in the least, be just as convenient or inconvenient to most of the defendants as the desired transferee District."

So... the plaintiff and at least one of the defendants is based in Michigan (and many of the others have offices there). None of the the parties are based in Texas. But because some of the defendants are based elsewhere, now it's suddenly ok to keep it in East Texas?

What's the likely end result? Any patent holder who wants to make sure a case remains in East Texas should make sure to sue many more companies who are distributed around the country (or the world), just to give judges in East Texas an excuse to keep the case there. That hardly seems to be living up to the spirit of what CAFC intended with its ruling...

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Do you have a digital SLR camera, some black construction paper, aluminum foil, a rubber band, and tape? Great, let's make a digital pinhole camera!

The pinhole camera is the simplest type of camera. It has no lens, only a teeny-tiny hole of an iris. This pinhole ensures that the light which reaches any position on the exposure surface originated from a single direction; as the hole diameter approaches zero, the possible light source for a point on the exposure surface becomes an increasingly narrow cone, approaching a straight line.

The result is that if you make the hole small enough, you can capture a very wide depth of field, with objects both near and far in focus. The small hole also reduces the amount of light that reaches the exposure surface, in this case a CCD, so you need to compensate with a very long exposure time. It's a perfect tool for capturing slow movement over time, or taking rich photos of still scenes that require a huge depth of field.

What's great about using a digital camera for this is that you can easily experiment with exposure times and see your results immediately.

What You'll Need

Aside from the camera (yeah, I stretched the $0 part a bit), you'll only need a few things: black paper, aluminum foil, a rubber band, and tape. Really, that's it.

Blocking Out Light

The first thing you need to do is cover the lens area in a way that ensures that the only light getting through to the CCD is the light coming through the pinhole. If any other light leaks in, you'll just end up with a washed out image.

First, remove the lens from your camera, put the cover on it, and put it in a safe place. Cut a sheet of black construction paper so that it will fit over the lens hole in your camera body. Cut a small hole in the center of the paper, and then carefully tape it to the camera body. This will block out most of the light, and it will also block any internal reflection.

Making The Pinhole

Take a square of aluminum foil and press it over the front of the camera on top of the black paper. You'll want to smooth this down to the surface of the camera body and then tape it in place. This will be blocking out any remaining cracks that would have allowed light through.

When you smooth the foil over the paper cover, you should be able to see a depression over the little hole you cut earlier. Go find the sharpest, thinnest needle you have, and carefully prick the aluminum in the center of this hole. You don't want to push the needle all the way in. You want to make this hole as tiny as possible, almost difficult to see with the naked eye. I find it helps to just gently press the needle against the surface and twist it a bit. Experiment and see what works best for you.

Enable ultra-long exposures

Your digital pinhole camera is essentially complete, but in order to take a decent photo, you need to take exposures over several minutes. To do this without jiggling the camera, you could use a remote shutter, but I feel like I've already cheated a bit with this $0 tutorial since I required you to have a DSLR. Instead of buying a remote shutter, here's a way to make a long exposure control for free.

Roll up a piece of tinfoil into a tightly packed ball about the size of a marble. Flatten out the ball a little bit and groove one side so that a rubber band will sit in the groove and not slip out. Place this ball over the shutter button on your camera, and wrap a rubber band over it and around the camera body. It's a little fidgety, but now you can position the ball to depress the button and take a photo, and pull the ball away to release the shutter.

Go Take Some Pinhole Photos

Just put your camera in "bulb" mode, place it on a tripod or a stable surface, and depress the shutter with your fancy shutter depressomatic aluminum ball. The necessary exposure time will vary depending on the light that's available, the camera's ISO setting, and how small you were able to make your pinhole, but expect at least a couple of minutes with indoor lighting if you did things right. Experiment to obtain the best results, and send us a link to your photos in the comments!

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Scammers look they're being stimulated by the government's stimulus plan, and it seems likely that they're finding plenty of marks in these gloomy economic times. For instance, fake job ads that are fronts for identity theft are up 345% over the last three years. It wouldn't be a stretch to think they'll become even more common, as more and more people start searching for jobs -- and their desperation leads them to lower their defenses in hopes of landing employment.

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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magacious writes "March 10 is the 133rd anniversary of the first telephone call. It occurred between Alexander Graham Bell and his assistant Thomas Watson back on this day in 1876. But there is some debate about whether Bell is actually the rightful owner of the crown for such invention. Having worked on the idea of transmitting speech using electricity for some time, Bell filed his patent on 14 February 1876, either just before or just after his main rival for the title of inventor of the telephone, Elisha Gray, filed his own. Bell won the patent and Gray died in obscurity."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

magacious writes "March 10 is the 133rd anniversary of the first telephone call. It occurred between Alexander Graham Bell and his assistant Thomas Watson back on this day in 1876. But there is some debate about whether Bell is actually the rightful owner of the crown for such invention. Having worked on the idea of transmitting speech using electricity for some time, Bell filed his patent on 14 February 1876, either just before or just after his main rival for the title of inventor of the telephone, Elisha Gray, filed his own. Bell won the patent and Gray died in obscurity."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I wrote about the Doomsday Sound Kit last week, but I didn't make a video. Since the kit is all about sound, and circuit bending, I decided that I really should post a video. This kit is a great introduction to soldering, circuit-bending, and hacking. I had a lot of fun building this kit, and the sounds you can generate are really interesting.

A noise generator that operates entirely on body resistance. The main circuit board is a left over from a Doomsday Novelty Device which beeps for 5 seconds when a button is pressed. At the heart of a circuit is a Motorola MC14001 U Quad Gate, basically a 4 oscillator circuit to tweak. Various spots on the board have been found to cause nice variations in the resulting sound that the circuit was originally intended to produce. The kit can fit into a very small housing, such as a VHS case, or a Kid's Lunchbox. The included touch contacts create a rugged interface with the board for interesting and expressive sound generation.

More about the Doomsday Sound Kit in the Maker Shed

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Watchismo has the incredible story of an apocryphal anti-slavery message that a watchmaker hid inside Abraham Lincoln's pocketwatch at the outbreak of the civil war:

Dillon, working in a D.C. watch repair shop in 1861, told family members that he -- by incredible happenstance -- had been repairing Lincoln's watch when news came that Fort Sumter had been attacked in South Carolina. It was the opening salvo of what became the Civil War.

Dillon told his children (and, half a century later, a reporter for the New York Times) that he opened the watch's inner workings and scrawled his name, the date and a message for the ages: "The first gun is fired. Slavery is dead. Thank God we have a President who at least will try."

Secret Message in Abraham Lincoln's Pocket Watch

Watchismo has the incredible story of an apocryphal anti-slavery message that a watchmaker hid inside Abraham Lincoln's pocketwatch at the outbreak of the civil war:

Dillon, working in a D.C. watch repair shop in 1861, told family members that he -- by incredible happenstance -- had been repairing Lincoln's watch when news came that Fort Sumter had been attacked in South Carolina. It was the opening salvo of what became the Civil War.

Dillon told his children (and, half a century later, a reporter for the New York Times) that he opened the watch's inner workings and scrawled his name, the date and a message for the ages: "The first gun is fired. Slavery is dead. Thank God we have a President who at least will try."

Secret Message in Abraham Lincoln's Pocket Watch

Two economists at Washington University in St Louis have published a paper arguing that copyright and patent are a net drag on the economy and should be abolished.

"From a public policy view, we'd ideally like to eliminate patent and copyright laws altogether," says Levine, John H. Biggs Distinguished Professor of Economics. "There's plenty of protection for inventors and plenty of protection and opportunities to make money for creators. It's not that we see this as some sort of charitable act that people are going to invent and create things without earning money. Evidence shows very strongly there are lots of ways to make money without patents and copyright."

Levine and Boldrin point to students being sued for 'pirating' music on the internet and AIDS patients in Africa dying because they cannot afford expensive drugs produced by patent holders as examples of the failure of the current system. Boldrin, the Joseph Gibson Hoyt Distinguished Professor in Arts & Sciences and Chair of the economics department says, "Intellectual property is in fact an intellectual monopoly that hinders rather than helps the competitive free market regime that has delivered wealth and innovation to our doorsteps..."

They call on Congress to reverse the burden of the proof on patent seekers by granting patents only to those capable of proving that:

• their invention has social value

• a patent is not likely to block even more valuable innovations

• the innovation would not be cost-effective absent a patent

Economists Say Copyright and Patent Laws Are Killing Innovation; Hurting Economy (via /.)

Two economists at Washington University in St Louis have published a paper arguing that copyright and patent are a net drag on the economy and should be abolished.

"From a public policy view, we'd ideally like to eliminate patent and copyright laws altogether," says Levine, John H. Biggs Distinguished Professor of Economics. "There's plenty of protection for inventors and plenty of protection and opportunities to make money for creators. It's not that we see this as some sort of charitable act that people are going to invent and create things without earning money. Evidence shows very strongly there are lots of ways to make money without patents and copyright."

Levine and Boldrin point to students being sued for 'pirating' music on the internet and AIDS patients in Africa dying because they cannot afford expensive drugs produced by patent holders as examples of the failure of the current system. Boldrin, the Joseph Gibson Hoyt Distinguished Professor in Arts & Sciences and Chair of the economics department says, "Intellectual property is in fact an intellectual monopoly that hinders rather than helps the competitive free market regime that has delivered wealth and innovation to our doorsteps..."

They call on Congress to reverse the burden of the proof on patent seekers by granting patents only to those capable of proving that:

• their invention has social value

• a patent is not likely to block even more valuable innovations

• the innovation would not be cost-effective absent a patent

Economists Say Copyright and Patent Laws Are Killing Innovation; Hurting Economy (via /.)

Some of the big proprietary software companies keep insisting that "piracy" is a big threat to their business (even if they quietly will admit that they actually benefit from piracy). After all, would a proprietary software company prefer that someone uses a competing product over using an unauthorized version of their software? In almost all cases, they'll prefer the unauthorized version, recognizing that it's much more likely to lead to future sales. So why do they keep taking actions that lead people to go to alternatives -- usually of the open source variety? The latest examples comes to us via Slashdot, which points out that in the spectacularly bankrupt country of Iceland, Microsoft has been pushing hard to get Microsoft resellers to pay up for licenses they sold to companies. The problem is that thousands of those underlying companies have gone bankrupt -- but Microsoft insists the resellers still need to pay. Their response has been to stop selling Microsoft products all together, and focus on open source alternatives instead. Perhaps it doesn't matter so much in a small, bankrupt country -- but these sorts of things have been happening elsewhere as well, and will quickly drive Microsoft customers right into the hands of competing products.

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Here's the perfect vegetarian geek lunch: a Tetris bento box! Not as good as the Donkey Kong lasagne, of course.

Bento Tuesday (Thanks, BingoTheChimp!)

Ponca City, We love you writes "The number of children with asthma has been rising for many years. About 1 in 10 children in the UK develop asthma, compared with about 1 in 25 in the 1960s. The reason for this isn't clear, although several theories have been put forward such as keeping our homes cleaner, and having central heating and more soft furnishings where house dust mites can multiply. Now based on more than 3,000 children whose respiratory health was tracked from birth to 11.5 years of age, researchers have found a new correlation with young children who spend more than two hours glued to the TV every day doubling their subsequent risk of developing asthma. 'This study has shown for the first time a positive association between increased duration of reported TV viewing in early childhood and the development of asthma by 11.5 years of age in children with no symptoms of asthma in early childhood,' said the researchers, led by A. Sherriff, from the University of Glasgow. It's not clear exactly how sedentary behaviors like television watching are tied to asthma, but there is some evidence to suggest exercise and deep breaths that come with it stretch the smooth muscles in the airways, while lack of exercise may make the lungs overly sensitive. The results add asthma to a catalog of undesirable outcomes, including obesity, diabetes, smoking, and promiscuity, tied to TV viewing."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Yesterday was the news that social networking and blogs had become more popular than email; today, word comes that Facebook has become the most significant source of traffic for a number of big web sites. It's overtaken Google for some sites, even with just a third of the unique visitors of the search behemoth. But, as paidContent points out, Facebook needs to figure out how to translate this traffic-generation power into revenues as a part of its bigger overall search for a monetization strategy. An issue persists for the likes of Google, too, though: as social networks start to become more powerful sources of traffic, will advertisers shift more of their dollars to them, and away from search-based keywords?

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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You can get these things at hardware stores in the US, but not in central Europe, where the Graffiti Research Lab Vienna operates. Use a light bulb and an electrical socket to create on-the-go power for your tools, in this case a projector.

The basic idea is pretty simple: in a lot of today's urban environments you can find a regular light bulb reasonably close-by. In Vienna, where this was executed, you can find one above almost every doorstep. The technology is even simpler - take the screw-cap of a regular light bulb and instead of connecting it to filaments it's being connected to a power socket.

There's an instructable, too!

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An anonymous reader writes "The construction and test firing of the National Ignition Facility have been completed. NIF was designed as the first facility ever to achieve self-sustaining nuclear fusion and, in particular, to reach the point of ignition in which more energy is generated from the reaction than went into creating it. While the recent 192-beam pulse only produced 80 kilojoules worth of energy, all signs point to NIF being able to reach an order of magnitude higher (PDF) than that in the coming year."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A few years back, there were some stories about how some scammers had found online manuals for popular ATMs, which included a default password, which was rarely changed (yes, that's an amazingly stupid design). This meant that it was fairly easy to program the ATM to believe that it held different denomination bills. For example, you could program it to think that it held $5 bills when it actually held $20s -- and then if you took out "$40" you would be given 8 bills -- or $160. Not surprisingly, other hackers have replicated this scam a bunch of times -- aided in large part by ATM owners who still haven't changed the default password.

Still, if you were a scammer pulling such a scam, you might think that it would make sense not to pull it at the same store multiple times. But, that's exactly what two guys did last year, where they tried to hit a local restaurant's ATM for the fourth time. By that point, the manager had been alerted to look out for them, and called the police on them when they came in again. There was a bit of a mess after that, as the manager tried to pull a gun on the scammers, and there was some sort of scuffle, a gunshot, and then a car chase... but eventually the guys were arrested. So, once again: ATM makers: stop offering machines with default passwords. ATM owners: change the default password on your machines. Scammers: don't be so dumb as to try to rip off the same place multiple times (or, maybe that's what we want, since it makes them easier to catch... but it's still dumb).

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The poor widdle babies at NBC are soooo unhappy with Jon Stewart's skewering of CNBC's stock-market boosterism and stupid behavior. If you haven't seen it watch this first and then come back:

As technology changes, so does the demands of law enforcement officials to figure out better ways to spy on your use of that technology. For example, efforts to wiretap Skype conversations has been a popular subject among law enforcement around the world. Down in Australia, the police are now looking for the right to hack your computer. At the very least, it would require a warrant, but a judge could authorize the police to hack into your computer and monitor it for up to 7 days at a time and not tell the owners for up to three years (depending on the circumstances -- and it would require several approved extensions for it to last that long). Not surprisingly, this is rather controversial, and security companies in particular have made it clear they want no part of this (i.e., they won't create backdoors) and fully expect their products to block such hacking attempts. How long until new legislation is proposed that forces security vendors to change their minds about that as well?

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snydeq writes "For the past several months, Microsoft has engaged in an extended public mea culpa about Vista, holding a series of press interviews to explain how the company's Vista mistakes changed the development process of Windows 7. Chief among these changes was the determination to 'define a feature set early on' and only share that feature set with partners and customers when the company is confident they will be incorporated into the final OS. And to solve PC-compatibility issues, Microsoft has said all versions of Windows 7 will run even on low-cost netbooks. Moreover, Microsoft reiterated that the beta of Windows 7 that is now available is already feature-complete, although its final release to business customers isn't expected until November." As a data point for how well this has all worked out in practice, reader The other A.N.Other recommends a ZDNet article describing rough benchmarks for three versions of Windows 7 against Vista and XP. In particular, Win-7 build 7048 (64-bit) vs. Win-7 build 7000 (32-bit and 64-bit) vs. Vista SP1 vs. XP SP3 were tested on both high-end and low-end hardware. The conclusions: Windows 7 is, overall, faster than both Vista and XP. As Windows 7 progresses, it's getting faster (or at least the 64-bit editions are). On a higher-spec system, 64-bit is best. On a lower-spec system, 32-bit is best.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Diane Rubio plays "Lulu's Back in Town" on ukulele.

We've never quite understood the reasoning employed in a few different countries to allow artists to get paid every time their artwork is sold. The given reason is usually that if the artwork becomes valuable at a later date, the artist should get a piece of that, but that doesn't make much sense. Once the artist becomes famous than all of his or her new works will also command a much higher premium. All such a "resale right" does is make it that much more expensive to buy and sell art, since you now have to pay a fraction of every transaction back to the artist. This actually harms the artists, because it makes people less willing to buy and sell their artwork. It basically punishes those who actually believe in an artist and buy their early works. It's been shown that such a resale right harms up-and-coming artists (it makes it more expensive to buy their works), and really only tends to help the super successful artists (i.e., those who are already earning plenty from their artwork).

Lawrence D'Oliveiro alerts us to the good news that New Zealand has decided to scrap such a plan. There's not a full explanation for why the plan was scrapped, but it has economically ignorant artists complaining that it's just not fair and it means New Zealand "doesn't value its artists." Hopefully someone will explain to them that making it more expensive for their artwork to be sold means that they'll be selling a lot less artwork -- and that doesn't seem very "valuable" at all.

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