Miracle Jones writes "Amazon has instituted an overnight policy that removes books that may be deemed offensive from their search system, despite the sales rank of the book and also irrespective of any complaints. Bloggers such as Ed Champion are calling for a 'link and book boycott,' asking people to remove links to Amazon from their web pages and stop buying books from them until the policy is reversed. Will this be bad business for Amazon, or will there new policies keep them out of trouble as they continue to grow and replace bookstores?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Miracle Jones writes "Amazon has instituted an overnight policy that removes books that may be deemed offensive from their search system, despite the sales rank of the book and also irrespective of any complaints. Bloggers such as Ed Champion are calling for a 'link and book boycott,' asking people to remove links to Amazon from their web pages and stop buying books from them until the policy is reversed. Will this be bad business for Amazon, or will there new policies keep them out of trouble as they continue to grow and replace bookstores?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Peter N. M. Hansteen writes "In real life, zombies feed off both weak minds and the weak passwords they choose. When the distributed brute-force attempts stopped abruptly after a couple of months of futile pounding on ssh servers, most of us thought they had seen sense and given up. Now, it seems that they have not; they are back. 'This can only mean that there were enough successful attempts at guessing people's weak passwords in the last round that our unknown perpetrators found it worthwhile to start another round. For all I know they may have been at it all along, probing other parts of the Internet ...' The article has some analysis and links to fresh log data."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Peter N. M. Hansteen writes "In real life, zombies feed off both weak minds and the weak passwords they choose. When the distributed brute force attempts stopped abruptly after a couple of months of futile pounding on ssh servers, most of us thought they had seen sense and given up. Now, it seems that they have not; they are back. 'This can only mean that there were enough successful attempts at guessing people's weak passwords in the last round that our unknown perpetrators found it worthwhile to start another round. For all I know they may have been at it all along, probing other parts of the Internet ...' The article has some analysis and links to fresh log data."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This week on the CRAFT blog we saw:

• Instructables Passover Guide
• Amazing Cut Paper Art of Michael Velliquette
  
• LilyPad Arduino Workshop in Berkeley This Summer
  
• The Coiled Basket Art of Carol Eckert
  
• 
  

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Time Warner's recently announced plan to expand their broadband transfer caps to new markets drew heavy criticism, which prompted their attempt to smooth things over with a ridiculously expensive "unlimited" plan. That wasn't enough for New York Representative Eric Massa, who now says he will draft legislation to "curb tiers, particularly in areas where a broadband provider owns a monopoly on service." Massa said, "Time Warner believes they can do this in Rochester, NY; Greensboro, NC; and Austin and San Antonio, Texas, and it's almost certainly just a matter of time before they attempt to overcharge all of their customers," adding, "I believe safeguards must be put in place when a business has a monopoly on a specific region."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

There is a great time sequence of the build, testing failure and success of this fundangerous project. Got a couple hundred pallets, a reasonably flat space and some time on your hands?

via Damon

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Spring has sprung, the grass is green again, the trees are in bloom, the animals are stirring. And to me, that all means one important thing: Peeps are in season! I've had a rather unnatural attraction to Peeps every since I was a child. There's something about this strange, over-the-top-sweet, pillowy confection that makes it simultaneous attractive and repulsive. It's WAY too much of a good thing: too much sweet, too much cute, two much color (this year's colors are vivid to a degree that's downright hallucinatory). And then there's the strange "mouth feel" of gooey, pillow-soft innards and a crunchy crystalline sugar coating. Not to mention the rather disturbing idea of eating a rack of baby chicks, fused to each other at the hip, sold to you at Eastern time by a company called Just Born of Bethlehem, PA. It all adds up to a uniquely American pop-surrealist experience that I revel in each year. And from all of the crazy, educational, and absurd websites and videos I've seen online over the years, so don't a lot of people. Happy Spring, everybody!

Every spring since it emerged, I've done a posting to my favorite Peeps-related activity: Peep War! It's a free downloadable tabletop wargame where you get to eat the enemies you attack/capture, a section at a time! Jelly beans counters are involved too. Yum. If you don't have Peeps and jelly beans to play with, you can use paper/cardboard counters. You are not advised to eat them.

The venerable website for evil mad science experimentation with Peeps is Peeps Research. They wrote the book on Peeps abuse... er I mean scientific study. They subject Peeps to extreme cold, heat, pressure, various solutions, and the health effects of smoking and drinking on Peeps. Hilarity (and a wee bit of actual learning) ensues.

Another Peeps research site is Bunny Survival Test. Here they perform experiments in laser light exposure, oxygen deprivation, and one intriguing one called "Coyote Test," which sadly, has a broken link.

The go-to Peeps experiment is Peeps in a microwave. Do a search on YouTube and you'll find dozens of examples. Here, Jeri Ellsworth shows you how to prevent the unholy conflagration that usually awaits Peeps subjected to microwave radiation. She built a "Faraday cage" out of metal strainers. As long as the openings in the strainer are smaller than the wavelength of the radio frequency, the Peeps are safe. The control Peep outside the cage? Not so much.

I love the way this video starts off: "Ten Peeps in a package. Ten days in a week. Coincidence? I don't think so." From there, the Peeps are subjected to all manner of destructive mayhem.

It's not all marshmallow chick cruelty in the name of basement science. There's also Peeps movie re-enactment, like this telling of the Lord of the Rings: Lord of the Peeps: Fellowship of the Peep.

And did you know that Peeps like to travel? They do.

For more Peeps fun and games, check out the Big List of Peeps Links. Unfortunately, it hasn't been updated in a while, so a number of the links are broken.

Previous Peeps coverage on Make: Online:

Electrocuting Peeps

Explody Easter Peeps (High speed photography)

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There's still time to start making or just watch this week's Weekend Project: The Truth Wristband .
Subscribe in iTunes to get all our Weekend Projects and PDFs delivered each week.

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Chris Shiflett writes "There's a new proposal ('URL shortening that doesn't hurt the Internet') floating around for using rev="canonical" to help put a stop to the URL-shortening madness. In order to avoid the great linkrot apocalypse, we can opt to specify short URLs for our own pages, so that compliant services (adoption is still low, because the idea is pretty fresh) will use our short URLs instead of TinyURL.com (or some other third-party alternative) replacements."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Negative Gamer is running a story discussing the need felt by the major game developers to create the next huge blockbuster, which often leads to innovation and change for their own sake rather than simply focusing on what makes a game fun. Quoting: "There seems to be this invisible pressure to create something that is highly 'intuitive' and incorporates the highest level of innovation that we have ever seen. The problem is that the newest ideas put into games are either gimmicky, terrible in execution, or blatantly ripping off another title. On the other hand there are series that feel the need to completely revamp a game that played perfectly fine before into something completely new that falls flat on its face. ... There's a critical problem with popular, mainstream video games that isn't as large with other mediums; they are expensive to make and require a lot of time and effort put in to create something masterful. With that, games must take cautious paths. I fully understand the risks, but adding unneeded material to certain games is not justifiable."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Kent sent this in through the comments:

Plastiki is a boat built entirely from reclaimed plastic bottles will sail from San Francisco to Sydney. The project is intended to raise awareness of the human impact on oceans and other ecosystems.

The boat is made up of about 16,000 plastic bottles and is an "effort to raise awareness of the recycling of plastic bottles, which he says are a symbol of global waste." says Rothschild. Skin-like panels made from recycled PET, a woven plastic fabric, will cover the hulls and a watertight cabin, which sleeps four. Only about 10 percent of the Plastiki will be made from new materials.

This won't be quite as rustic as Kon-Tiki, but it looks like a fun time. They are planning a launch in the Summer of 2009.

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Above, the song I listen to every year on this day, from the great Patti Smith. The video quality of this fan-shot live footage is horrible, but the sound is tolerable, and it's the only embeddable version of this beautiful track I could find online. Here's the album, one of the five I'd pack on a spaceship if I were headed to the offworld colonies: Patti Smith / EASTER. (CD + MP3 via Amazon)

Simmons writes with news of research that demonstrated vulnerabilities in Skype and Google Voice that would have allowed attackers to eavesdrop on calls or place unauthorized calls of their own. "The attacks on Google Voice and Skype use different techniques, but essentially they both work because neither service requires a password to access its voicemail system. For the Skype attack to work, the victim would have to be tricked into visiting a malicious Web site within 30 minutes of being logged into Skype. In the Google Voice attack (PDF), the hacker would first need to know the victim's phone number, but Secure Science has devised a way to figure this out using Google Voice's Short Message Service (SMS). Google patched the bugs that enabled Secure Science's attack last week and has now added a password requirement to its voicemail system, the company said in a statement. ... The Skype flaws have not yet been patched, according to James." Reader EricTheGreen contributes related news that eBay may sell Skype back to its original founders.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This article by Pete Cashmore at Mashable is now the top item on TechMeme.

Cashmore is one of very small number of users who Twitter includes in their Suggested Users List, which has resulted in huge growth in their number of followers.

Three months ago, he had 28,621 followers. Today he has 417,347. In the same timeframe my Twitter feed grew from 16,062 to 21,108, which represents something of a baseline for users not gifted by Twitter with placement on the SUL. (Source: twittercounter.com.)

Did Twitter favor him with this gift because they like what he says about them, or to encourage him to be more favorable in his writing? Or some other reason? Did he pay for this placement? (Note that would, imho, be the ethical thing to do, and the same deal should be offered to everyone.)

Would Cashmore withhold or temper criticism of Twitter because he fears they may cut him off?

Would a reader question his impartiality? (This reader does. I can't see how he can help but be influenced.)

Does this kind of favoritism hurt Twitter as a medium for journalism?

Another question will likely come up at some point -- Will Cashmore have to pay taxes on this gift? It could turn into a pretty big liability, even in a non-ethical sense.

I wrote about this previously on March 12.

CurtMonash writes "Twitter was hit Saturday by a worm that caused victims' accounts to tweet favorably about the StalkDaily website. Infection occurred when one went to the profile page of a compromised account, and was largely spread by the kind of follower spam more commonly used by multi-level marketers. Apparently the worm was an XSS attack, exploiting a vulnerability created in a recent Twitter update that introduced support for OAuth, and it was created by the 17-year-old owner of the StalkDaily website. More information can be found in the comment thread to a Network World post I put up detailing the attack, or in the post itself. By evening, Twitter claimed to have closed the security hole."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Photo from The Boston Globe

A few years ago a dragon turned up down the street. Chuck Nudd had spent some winter months concocting a behemoth animatronic dragon from some cast off steel junk. It started out as a dinosaur, but morphed into a dragon as the design came out. Draco is both wildly popular and just another town resident. Chuck's wife Robin and kids dress the dragon for various holidays and events. This week he stands proud as the easter bunny.

Check out this article in the Boston Globe.

Today Draco is posing as the Easter bunny, with furry ears, a whiskered nose, a fluffy tail, and a basket of eggs. A couple thousand daffodils, heralds of spring, provide a pretty backdrop for the creature, who has apparently succeeded in flying under the radar of any zoning bylaw that might restrict what is placed in one's yard.

A while ago I met up with man and dragon at a parade and interviewed them.

Chuck Nudd created Draco out of lots of steel Junk he had. The animated dragon has flapping wings powered by a windshield washer motor and illuminated turn signal eyes. Sometimes he gets a smoke machine to help him breathe. Draco is often decorated for the seasons and holidays. He moves around town on the back of Chuck's trailer and has been seen at sports events, graduations, parades and in his lair on the Nudd property.

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Lauren sez,

PLAY MACHINIMA LAW

DATE: April 24-25, 2009
LOCATION: Stanford Law School

Register now.

Machinima.
...It has been hailed as the art form of the 21st century.
...It is redefining music videos.
...And reinventing the videogame.
...It might be the future of cinema.

But there's a catch: if you make machinima, you might be breaking the law.

Or are you?

Find out at Stanford University. "Play Machinima Law" from April 24-25, 2009. This two-day conference will cover key issues associated with player-generated, computer animated cinema that is based on 3D game and virtual world environments. Speakers include machinima artists/players, legal experts, commercial game developers, theorists, and more. Topics include: game art, game hacking, open source and "modding," player/consumer-driven innovation, cultural/technology studies, fan culture, legal and business issues, transgressive play, game preservation, and notions of collaborative co-creation drawn from virtual worlds and online games. Films will be shown throughout the conference, including: Douglas Grayeton's Molotov Alva and His Search for the Creator and Joshua Diltz' Mercy of the Sea.

REGISTER NOW: Play Machinima Law (Thanks, Lauren!)

Image from VEIL

VEIL, a design initiative in Victoria Australia, has an innovative proposal of reorganizing city schools. It does not appear that the plan has been implemented, but the description presents a positive view of their proposal to solve some of the educational and environmental problems facing school systems.

Students from all quarters meet several times a week for communal activities, and expensive or large equipment and facilities are each located at one of the quarter schools with time-tabled access for all students. Classrooms are 'virtually extended' to other classrooms at another campus, and operate like a double-length room with one end-wall projecting the 'other half' of the physically separated room.

Image from VEIL

Each quarter school, approx 4 k apart, now takes students only from its 2 k radius. Students from all campuses meet several times a week, as a school, for communal activities such as sport and performing arts. Expensive or large equipment and facilities (such as a theatre or a gymnasium or senior year science laboratories) are located only at one quarter schools, with time-tabled access for all students. Small electric buses move students around for these events; the sites of the quarter schools were carefully selected to make such movement efficient and effective.

Image from VEIL

The Quarter schools concept school is also leading to a testing ground for some interesting technologies on the school campus, like solar shades and green buildings.

The building of resilient local systems and maintaining a low carbon and low water consumption lifestyle has demanded an increase in lifelong learning amongst community members. The idea of life-long learning is now widespread and facilities previously inhabited only between 9 and 3 on weekdays are now utilised around the clock. In response, the quarter nodes have developed as local, vibrant, community hubs and a valuable community resource. Not only do the quarter schools function as a meeting place for the purchase and exchange of local produce they also monitor and provide feedback on the health of the surrounding community and ecology.

With our economic slowdown in full swing, there are loads of talented, creative people and firms doing interesting work because they believe in projects like this. As Dale said in Make: Talk 05, "A recession is a terrible thing to waste".

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Hugh Pickens writes "Doug Feaver has an interesting story in the Washington Post 'in defense of the anonymous, unmoderated, often appallingly inaccurate, sometimes profane, frequently off point and occasionally racist reader comments that washingtonpost.com allows to be published at the end of articles and blogs.' Feaver says that during his seven-year tenure as editor and executive editor of washingtonpost.com he kept un-moderated comments off the site, but now, four years after retiring, he says he has come to think that online comments are a terrific addition to the conversation, and that journalists need to take them seriously. 'The subjects that have generated the most vitriol during my tenure in this role are race and immigration,' writes Feaver. 'But I am heartened by the fact that such comments do not go unchallenged by readers. In fact, comment strings are often self-correcting and provide informative exchanges.' Feaver says that comments are also a pretty good political survey. 'The first day it became clear that a federal bailout of Wall Street was a real prospect, the comments on the main story were almost 100 percent negative. It was a great predictor of how folks feel, well out in front of the polls. We journalists need to pay attention to what our readers say, even if we don't like it. There are things to learn.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes "With Jaunty Jackalope scheduled for release in 12 days on April 23, this blog posting describes how to switch to apt-p2p in preparation for the upgrade. This should help significantly to reduce the load on the mirrors, smooth out the upgrade experience for all involved, and bypass the numerous problems that have occurred in the past on Ubuntu release day. Remember to disable all third-party repositories beforehand."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Alex sez, "I recently had the chance to visit Peleliu island - a tiny 14 square miles of coral limestone in the middle of the Pacific. In 1944 it was the scene of one of the most ferocious battles in the Pacific War. Tons of the war stuff (tanks, guns, ruined buildings) lies out in the jungle, and I took a tour round, snapping some interesting photos and listening to stories (and weirdly, I discovered during writing the post that the battle was the origin of the phrase 'thousand yard stare')."

Unlike previous battles in the Pacific, the Japanese didn't place the entire emphasis of their strategy on defending the beaches - they fortified the island, in particular a mountain called Umurbrogol. The Japanese riddled Umurbrogol with a huge network of caves and tunnels from which to operate (this image shows a plan of one complex). Once they had completed their work, they evacuated the civilians, and waited for the Americans.

Below you scan see the entrance to one of the Japanese caves, and beneath that, a shot from inside, looking back to the entrance. The entrance itself probably isn't more than 3 or 4 foot high; inside the cave ceilings are slightly higher, although very uneven - but it's not a great place to be when, like me, you're 6 foot 2. It was a horrible place to spend 15 minutes, but caves like these were where the Japanese forces lived for the two month duration of the battle of Peleliu. Inside, you can still see discarded boots, bottles and bullets.

Thousand Yard Stares: Ruins and Ghosts of the Battle of Peleliu, 1944, 2008 (Thanks, Alex!)

David Rothman sez, "Fed up with DRM, Stephen Windwalker and I are tagging our books "drmfree" (no quotes in the actual tag). We're both authors of newspaper-related novels among other works, and in a TeleRead.org post we're encouraging writers of all kinds to do the same at Amazon's Kindle Store and elsewhere. Care to join in, Cory? What's more, we suggest that readers tag DRMless books on their own, when they find them at stores. The suggested tagging standard is 'drmfree' without any hyphen to muck things up. One reason for the tag is to make it harder for Amazon to take away your Kindle books, as happened to a customer who supposedly returned too many NONbook items. With DRM, you simply cannot own books for real. Lessen the threat by buying 'drmfree' books when possible. Again--no quotes on the actual tag."

I'm with David on this -- I wish I understood more about the DRM on the Kindle. I've been trying to find out for weeks, for example, what the story is with the "DRM-free" option for Kindle means -- is there a patent or contractual term that prohibits owners of Kindle DRM-free books from moving them to competing devices, or patents or other claims that prevents competitors from creating readers or converters for these books?

And, what, exactly, what the mechanism by which Amazon removes the "read-aloud" feature to comply with requests from the Authors Guild's members? Is that a firmware update to the device? A flag in the file-format? If the former, can users refuse the updates? If the latter, what other flags are there, and does buying a DRM-free Kindle file mean that they can't be switched on for you?

drmfree tag campaign starts on Amazon: Help identify safer-to-own books and other items! (Thanks, David!)

Here's Howard Gossage's February 1960 Harpers essay, "How to Look at Billboards," in which he argues for the impending demise of billboard advertising due to zoning rules. Gossage, an advertising exec has some well-thought-through tactical advice for the paleo-adbusters of the 1960s:

Do you see why it is a mistake to attack outdoor advertising on aesthetic grounds? The row then becomes a matter of comparative beauty and one can go on haggling about that forever. In a sense the garden clubs have led us down the garden path. For when the girls insist that they shall never see a billboard as lovely as a tree it then becomes legitimate to consider all the things a billboard is lovely as. There are quite a few: ramshackle barns, flophouses, poolrooms, cheap lodgings for ancient ladies with orange-tinted hair. Since the world is absolutely stiff with arguably uglier objects it may be some time before the billboards come down; presumably the last billboard will stand on top of the last shack.

The other thing wrong with the aesthetic line of attack is its utter irrelevancy. It is like arguing that mice should be kept out of the kitchen because they don't match the Formica. What a billboard looks like has nothing to do with whether it ought to be there. Nor does the fact that it carries advertising have anything to do with it, either. It would be the same thing if it were devoted exclusively to reproductions of the old masters; just as the open range would have been the same thing if they had only run peacocks on it. The real question is: has outdoor advertising the right to exist at all?

...

Outdoor advertising is peddling a commodity it does not own and without the owner's permission: your field of vision. Possibly you have never thought to consider your rights in the matter. Nations put the utmost importance on unintentional violations of their air space. The individual's air space is intentionally violated by billboards every day of the year.

Got other citations to proto-manifestos about the attention economy?

How to look at billboards (via Kottke)

From the MAKE Flickr pool

• Radioactivity plays the strings
• Atomic disruptor raygun [above, bottom-right]
• Quickly Mr. Bigglesworth - to the Cat Cave!
• Graphical user interface in the physical world
• Contact mic earrings [above, bottom-left]
• Dekatron timer brings vintage tube tech to the kitchen [above, top-right]
• Glass insulators as LED lamps [above, top-left]

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Jamie found a post on ScienceBlogs that serves as a stark example of the law of unintended consequences, as well as the ability of private industry to game a system of laws to their advantage. It seems that large paper companies stand to reap as much as $8 billion this year by doing the opposite of what an alternative-fuel bill intended. Here is the article from The Nation with more details and a mild reaction from a Congressional staffer. "[T]he United States government stands to pay out as much as $8 billion this year to the ten largest paper companies.... even though the money comes from a transportation bill whose manifest intent was to reduce dependence on fossil fuel, paper mills are adding diesel fuel to a process that requires none in order to qualify for the tax credit. In other words, we are paying the industry — handsomely — to use more fossil fuel. 'Which is,' as a Goldman Sachs report archly noted, the 'opposite of what lawmakers likely had in mind when the tax credit was established.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Here's a new twist on art, electricity, biology and music from Tokyo based dj Daito Manabe. His site is in Japanese and English, which helps a bunch.

Redefining the existent media and technologies from unique angles, I have been active in the various fields, such as art, design, and even research and development. I produce the output of sounds, images, and light through analyzing and transforming the numerical values gained from a various sensors and input devices.

This one seems to be an update on Laurie Anderson's album cover for United States Live, which included an early how-to for maker music fun in the liner notes. United States was worth setting up the turntable for another listen.

Check out Becky's intro to Daito Manabe's appearance at Dorkbot NY and Phillip's Pole dance - Strain sensor+ LED experiment.

Thanks Zach!

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Another week has passed and we introduced even more cool kits in the Maker Shed. Also, earlier in the week I made another Arduino 101 video. This time I focused on the Memsic Accelerometer. I had a lot of positive feedback, so keep an eye online for more Arduino how-to's.

How-to Tuesday: Arduino 101 Accelerometers

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theodp writes "Just three days before the Spitfire pub was to open on Microsoft's Entertainment & Devices Division campus, TechFlash reports that Microsoft got cold feet and pulled the plug on the project, leaving the bar's owner and his 22 employees in the lurch. 'I am completely stunned and disappointed by the decision,' said now lease-less owner Jonathan Sposato, who's stuck with space built out as a pub, complete with a giant bar, a fireplace, and eight beer taps. (He says it wouldn't be economically viable to refit it as a restaurant.) Microsoft spokesman Lou Gellos confirmed the company's sudden change of heart: 'The goal was always to create a cool gathering place for employees, but to do so in a manner that's consistent with a business environment. We decided we should do something more appropriate, and that meant not having a pub.' The new pub had been in development for more than a year."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Quantos writes with word that in Sweden, in addition to a drop in traffic following the introduction of the IPRED anti-file sharing law, the country also saw a doubling of legal downloads. "The sale of music via the Internet and mobile phones has increased by 100 percent since the Swedish anti-file sharing IPRED law entered into force last week, according to digital content provider InProdicon. '...I don't know if this is only because of IPRED, but it is definitely a sign of a major change,' said managing director Klas Brännström. InProdicon provides half of the downloaded tunes in Sweden via several online and mobile music services." Meanwhile The Pirate Bay's anticipated VPN service has seen over 113,000 requests for beta invitations since late last month; 80% are from Sweden. Traffic numbers may begin to rise again once the service goes live.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Narrative Fallacy sends along a piece from the Telegraph on efforts by Goldman Sachs to silence a blogger who is posting commentary critical of the bank. "Goldman Sachs has instructed Wall Street law firm Chadbourne & Parke to pursue blogger Mike Morgan, warning him in a recent cease-and-desist letter that he may face legal action if he does not close down his website goldmansachs666.com. According to the C&D letter, dated April 8, the bank is rattled because the site 'violates several of Goldman Sachs' intellectual property rights' and also 'implies a relationship' with the bank itself. Morgan claims he has followed all legal requirements to own and operate the website and that the header of the site clearly states that the content has not been approved by the bank. In a post entitled Goldman Sachs vs Mike Morgan, the blogger predicts that the fight will probably end up in court. He went through a similar battle with US home builder Lennar a few years ago after he set up a website to collect information on what he alleged was shoddy workmanship in its homes. 'Since I went through this with Lennar, I've had advice from some of the best intellectual property lawyers, and I know exactly what I can and can't do. We're not going to back down from this.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

christian.einfeldt writes "It seems as if almost every other week there is news of another government migration toward Free Open Source Software. Two of the most recent such moves come from Hungary and the tiny independent former Russian republic of Tatarstan. On April 2, The Hungarian government announced that it will be modifying its procurement rules to mandate that open source procurement funding match expenditures for proprietary software, according to Ferenc Baja, deputy minister for information technology. In Tatarstan, a Republic of 3.8 million inhabitants, the Deputy Minister of Education announced that by the end of this school year, all 2,400 educational institutions in Tatarstan will have completed a transition to GNU-Linux, following a successful pilot program in rolled out in 2008."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

After World War II, Thor Heyerdahl and his signal corps buddies arranged an adventure of a quieter, calmer, lower tech sort. After arranging backing for their research project, the Kon-Tiki, they went down to South America, and built a raft from balsa logs and sailed it across the Pacific.

For more than a century scientists had debated as to whether balsa rafts were seaworthy, and to what extent it might have been possible for the aboriginal inhabitants of South America to have contributed to the peopling of the Pacific islands. The experts had finally concluded that the balsa raft was water absorbent and therefore compelled to hug the home coast where it could be beached at intervals and dried out in the sun. It was also argued that low deck of an open raft would be unprotected in the high sea, and furthermore, that the balsa raft would dissolve as soon as the big logs started chafing on the rope lashing that held the craft together. Due to the general disregard for the former means of navigation in ancient South America, it had already been agreed, for practical reasons, Polynesia could only have been reached from direction of Asia, until the arrival of European ships.

Their super old-school adventure was to set out to test Heyerdahl's theory of the settlement of the South Pacific Islands. There is more information at the Kon-Tiki Museum.

The object of the expedition was to test the sea-going abilities of the South American balsa raft, and to investigate whether it would have been practically possible for the original native population of Peru, the Incas and their remarkably cultured predecessors, to have reached the islands out in the open Pacific.

There is a video for download, and the book was Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Retro | Digg this!