Cludge writes "ZDNet has a story (and several related articles) about how Symantec has discovered evidence of an all-Mac based botnet that is actively involved in a DOS attack. Apparently, security on the exploited Macs (call them iBots?) was compromised when unwary users bit-torrented pirated copies of iWork 09 and Photoshop CS4 that contained malware. From the article: 'They describe this as the "first real attempt to create a Mac botnet" and notes that the zombie Macs are already being used for nefarious purposes.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

With the economy in so much trouble, state tax revenues are being hit hard -- so, rather than figuring out ways to spend more wisely (what a concept), they're looking for ways to boost tax revenues, and are hitting up two popular online tax targets: taxes on physical goods purchased online and taxes on digital downloads. Of course, the whole (official) purpose of a sales tax was that it was supposed to be used to pay for the infrastructure that made it possible for you to drive to the store and purchase the product (e.g., the roads...). That's not always the case for online ordering (though, some will point out that local infrastructure plays a part on the delivery side). However, it's difficult to see any justification at all (other than a blatant money grab) for a digital download sales tax. But, state officials don't even seem to be looking for any real justification. They're just saying that they need more tax revenue.

Another point raised, in the article on taxing digital downloads, is that politicians don't seem to be distinguishing between digital goods and online services. The person quoted in the article suggests that's a problem, but I'd argue that the real mistake is in thinking that there actually is a "digital good." These days, pretty much all sales of "digital goods" are nothing more than a service. So if we believe that services shouldn't be taxed, then digital goods shouldn't be taxed either. They're the same thing.

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Al writes "Researchers from Carnegie Mellon University have created a remarkably low-power server architecture using netbook processors and flash memory cards. The server design, dubbed a 'fast array of wimpy nodes,' or FAWN, is only designed to perform simple tasks, but the CMU team say it could be perfect for large Web companies that have to retrieve large amounts of data from RAM. A set-up including 21 individual nodes draws a maximum of just 85 watts under real-world conditions. The researchers say that a FAWN cluster could offer a low-power replacement for sites that currently rely on Memcached to access data from RAM."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

We've seen all sorts of arguments by folks who felt defamed to get around Section 230 safe harbors that say a service provider isn't liable for the content created by a user -- but this is a first: a woman is suing Google, claiming that the safe harbors don't apply, because the allegedly defamatory content comes from a blogger who is now deceased, and thus she cannot go after him to get him to remove the content. Thus, she claims, her only choice is to sue Google. As Eric Goldman points out in the link above, it's not clear this is true at all. The guy's assets clearly passed on to someone -- so someone must own the rights to the blogpost, whether they know it or not. It's difficult to see how a court would find Google liable, no matter what. However, as Goldman also notes, it would seem that there would be many more effective ways to have this content disappear if it was really an issue.

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snydeq writes "Lawyer Jonathan Moskin has called into question the long-term impact last year's Java Model Railroad Interface court ruling will have on open source adoption among corporate entities. For many, the case in question, Jacobsen v. Katzer, has represented a boon for open source, laying down a legal foundation for the protection of open source developers. But as Moskin sees it, the ruling 'enables a set of potentially onerous monetary remedies for failures to comply with even modest license terms, and it subjects a potentially larger community of intellectual property users to liability.' In other words, in Moskin's eyes, Jacobsen v. Katzer could make firms wary of using open source software because they fear that someone in the food chain has violated a copyright, thus exposing them to lawsuit. It should be noted that Moskin's firm has represented Microsoft in anti-trust litigation before the European Union."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

snydeq writes "Lawyer Jonathan Moskin has called into question the long-term impact last year's Java Model Railroad Interface court ruling will have on open source adoption among corporate entities. For many, the case in question, Jacobsen v. Katzer, has represented a boon for open source, laying down a legal foundation for the protection of open source developers. But as Moskin sees it, the ruling 'enables a set of potentially onerous monetary remedies for failures to comply with even modest license terms, and it subjects a potentially larger community of intellectual property users to liability.' In other words, in Moskin's eyes, Jacobsen v. Katzer could make firms wary of using open source software because they fear that someone in the food chain has violated a copyright, thus exposing them to lawsuit. It should be noted that Moskin's firm has represented Microsoft in anti-trust litigation before the European Union."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Maggie Koerth-Baker is a guest blogger on Boing Boing. A freelance science and health journalist, Maggie lives in Minneapolis, brain dumps on Twitter, and writes quite often for mental_floss magazine.

I am so sorry.

I ran across this image while searching for something to illustrate that last post and just can't not share it.

Again. My apologies. Rest assured, I'm going to have nightmares tonight, too. We're all in this together.

So that? Is a hairless chimpanzee. According to RedEyedRex, the Flickr user who took the picture, it lives at the Mysore Zoo in India. Its hobbies (presumably) include eating various fruits and making humans feel deeply uncomfortable.

The FNP writes "Time Warner has postponed their plans to test tiered data caps in Greensboro NC, Rochester NY, San Antonio TX, and Austin TX. This announcement comes shortly after the media started reporting on Eric Massa's opposition and protests planned for this Saturday outside of Time Warner's offices in Greensboro and Rochester." There's also a good piece at Ars on the fall of the current tiered-pricing plans.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

People have been submitting various versions of the infamous Domino's Pizza employee grossout video of two employees doing... er... bad things to food, that's been the talk of the social media world all week, but there really didn't seem to be that much of real interest to talk about here -- or at least nothing that hadn't really been discussed to death elsewhere. As plenty of folks have pointed out, the whole event and Domino's reaction (who knows how successful it will eventually be) will certainly become a regular case study concerning "social media" and how companies can and should respond to certain events. On the whole, I think Domino's has made the best of a really awful situation which has no really good response.

That said, there were two interesting side stories involved in all of this that haven't received much additional attention, but both seem to fit into themes we discuss here on a regular basis. The first is that, in the NY Times' coverage of the story, it notes that the woman involved, Kristy Hammonds, eventually used a copyright claim to get the video taken down from YouTube -- though, of course, they're now available in many more places. It seems like an odd sort of thing to try to pull down via a copyright claim. After all, she had put the video up on YouTube in the first place, even if she later came to regret it. And, by this point, the video is clearly part of a larger news story, so it's not clear if there's really a legitimate DMCA takedown to be issued over the video... Of course, in the end, it's really a meaningless gesture. The video is spread so far and wide that no takedown is going to make it disappear.

The second issue of relevance is the fact that it was folks online at the always excellent Consumerist website who were able to take the original video and track down the actual location of the Domino's franchise in question, and to alert Domino's corporate execs. While we keep hearing old school journalists whine about how no investigative reporting gets done without newspapers, this situation shows exactly how a group of motivated, interested folks, can do plenty of sleuthing and exposing of malfeasance themselves. That's not to say, of course, that this is "the model" for investigative journalism -- but to show that the whole space is changing these days, and it no longer requires a classically trained journalist in every situation. If an investigation needs to happen, there are ways to make it happen.

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Maggie Koerth-Baker is a guest blogger on Boing Boing. A freelance science and health journalist, Maggie lives in Minneapolis, brain dumps on Twitter, and writes quite often for mental_floss magazine.

Back in February, I went to the American Association for the Advancement of Science conference in Chicago. The whole thing was pretty much a geeked-out blast, but one of my favorite sessions was this four-hour long symposium, the crux of which can basically be summed up as, "Evolution: It Works, Bitches." This particular tidbit, which I originally heard there in a lecture given by Brown University biology professor Kenneth Miller, is just totally nifty and must be shared.

So here's the thing: We have 46 chromosomes. Our nearest great ape relatives have 48. On the surface, it looks like we must have lost two. But that's actually a huge problem. Made up of organized packs of DNA and proteins, chromosomes don't just up and vanish. In fact, it's doubtful any primate could survive a mutation that simply deleted a pair of chromosomes. That's because chromosomes are to the human body what instruction sheets are to inexpensive, Swedish flat-pack furniture. If you're missing one screw, you can still put that bookcase together pretty easily. But if the how-to guide suddenly jumps from page 1 (take plywood panels out of box--uff da) to page 5 (enjoy bookcäse!), you're likely to end up missing something pretty vital. All this left scientists with a thorny dilemma: How could we have a common ancestor with great apes, but fewer chromosomes?

Turns out: The chromosomes aren't missing at all.
Genetic investigators caught the first whiff of the prodigal chromosomes' scent in 1982. That year, a paper published in the journal Science described a very funny phenomenon. Researchers knew all chromosomes had distinctive signatures; patterns of DNA sequences that can be reliably found in specific spots, including in the center and on the ends. These end-cap sequences are called telomeres. Molecular biologist Elizabeth Blackburn says telomeres are like the little plastic tips that keep your shoelaces from unravelling. They protect the ends of chromosomes and hold things together. Given that important function, you wouldn't expect to find telomeres hanging out on other parts of the chromosome. But that's exactly what the 1982 study reported. Looking at human chromosome 2, the scientists found telomeres snuggled up against the centromere--the central sequence. What's more, these out-of-place human telomeres were strikingly similar to telomeres that can be found, in their proper location, on two great ape chromosomes.

This evidence laid the groundwork for a brilliant discovery. Rather than falling apart, the two missing chromosomes had fused together. Their format changed, but they didn't lose any information, so the mutation wasn't deadly. Instead, scientists now think, the fusion made it difficult for our ancestors to mate with the ancestors of chimpanzees, leading our two species to strike out alone. In the two decades since the original study, more evidence has surfaced backing this up, which leads us to 2005, when the chimpanzee genome was sequenced around the same time that the National Human Genome Research Institute published a detailed survey of human chromosome 2. According to Kenneth Miller, we can now see extra centromeres in chromosome 2 and trace how its genes neatly line up with those on chimpanzee chromosomes 12 and 13. It's a great example of evidence supporting the common descent of man and ape.

I'm currently in the process of putting together a mental_floss story looking at this, and several other awesome experiments revolving around the origins of life. I'm not sure yet when it will be published, but, obviously, I'm really excited about it.

Photo courtesy feverblue

An anonymous reader asks "Is there a solution for online storage of encrypted data providing encrypted search and similar functions over the encrypted data? Is there an API/software/solution or even some online storage company providing this? I don't like Google understanding all my unencrypted data, but I like that Google can search them when they are unencrypted. So I would like to have both: the online storage provider does not understand my data, but he can still help me with searching in them, and doing other useful stuff. I mean: I send to the remote server encrypted data and later an encrypted query (the server cannot decipher them), and the server sends me back a chunk of my encrypted data stored there — the result of my encrypted query. Or I ask for the directory structure of my encrypted data (somehow stored in my data too — like in a tar archive), and the server sends it back, without knowing that this encrypted chunk is the directory structure. I googled for this and found some papers, however no software and no online service providing this yet." Can anyone point to an available implementation?

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Wow! The creators of Nerd Merit Badges made a Boing Boing badge. I love this! Unfortunately, I don't see it on the Nerd Merit Badges site yet. (Thanks, Jess Hemerly!)

Over at the BAMIntelBlog, Danny Loschiavo posts about the Subivor Subway Emergency Kit. It's basically a fanny pack with stuff that supposedly will help you out if you're in the subway during a terrorist attack. The kit is $39.99 and includes a free tote bag and, er, Metro card holder. Here's what the Subivor contains:

1 - SURVIVAL MASK disposable anti-fog full facemask, protects against Toxic Smoke,Concrete Dust, Debris, Radio Active Dirty Bomb, Influenza, Small Pox, and Anthrax.

1 - 3 1/2 inch Flashlight

1 - 7 inch Orange Pry bar

1 - Silver tone Metal Whistle

1 - Orange Moist Towelette Pouch

1 - Compact Bag

Subivor

The Arduino Mega in the Maker Shed is the latest micro-controller from the Arduino team. The Mega is built around the ATmega1280. It's perfect for anyone looking for more room for code or to be able to control a lot more LEDs, sensors, servos, or motors. It has 54 digital input/output pins (of which 14 can be used as PWM outputs), 16 analog inputs, 4 UARTs. Another great feature is the Arduino Mega is compatible with most shields designed for the Arduino Duemilanove or Diecimila.

More about the Arduino Mega in the Maker Shed

In the Maker Shed:


Make: Arduino

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In the latest skirmish between the Associated Press and Shepard Fairey over copyright concerning his iconic poster of Barack Obama, Fairey has filed new counterclaims against the AP, including that the AP used the photo of Fairey's poster without getting a license. He also lists out a number of other images of artwork that the AP did not get a license to use, but which it uses within photos, and then states:

The doctrine of unclean hands and basic principles of equity prohibit The AP from contending that Counterclaim Defendants' Obama Works infringe The AP's copyrights when The AP itself exploits the copyrighted work of Fairey and other artists without permission and in a manner that is far less transformative than the Obama Works, as illustrated but not limited to, the photographs listed above.

It seems this battle is getting nasty. Of course, while making these claims may feel good, it's hard to believe that they'll be all that compelling. The AP will clearly claim that its photos of these pieces of artwork were fair use, as part of news commentary. But, that's probably part of the point being raised by Fairey's legal team. It's unlikely to believe that the AP really abused Fairey's copyright or the copyrights of these other artists, but if it can get the AP defending its acts on fair use principles, then they can easily use the AP's words against it, in explaining why Fairey's image is also covered by fair use.

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Mike writes "If you buy a Kindle and some Kindle ebooks from Amazon, be careful of returning items. Amazon decided that one person had returned too many things, so they suspended his Amazon account, which meant that he could no longer buy any Kindle books, and any Kindle subscriptions he's paid for stop working. After some phone calls, Amazon granted him a one-time exception and reactivated his account again." Take this with as much salt as you'd like.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This is simultaneously ridiculous and very awesome. I like the stalagmite pile of pizza boxes on the table in the second image. The joys of making and the all-night work-a-thon.

Steampunk Snowboard by Koda & Nino [via Steampunk Workshop]

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snydeq writes "Internal politics and poor leadership on sustainable IT strategies are among the top reasons preventing organizations from practicing proper PC power management — to the tune of $2.8 billion wasted per year powering unused PCs. According to a recent survey, 42 percent of IT shops do not manage PC energy consumption simply because no one in the organization has been made responsible for doing so — this despite greater awareness of IT power-saving myths, and PC power myths in particular. Worse, 22 percent of IT admins surveyed said that savings from PC power management 'flow to another department's budget.' In other words, resources spent by IT vs. the permanent energy crisis appear to result in little payback for IT."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

BB pal and former guestblogger Douglas Rushkoff has an idea for "craigbucks," an alternative currency to be used on Craigslist. (Doug's new book, Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back, is out on June 2.) Annalee Newitz explains "craigbucks" and Doug's vision for DIY currencies in a Portfolio.com article:

When the developed world gets over its bias for "printing press–era cash technology" then complementary currencies will be commonplace here too, Rushkoff predicts. He sees a future that has people literally reprogramming their economic systems, using computer networks and handheld devices to administer new forms of grassroots cash. Those currencies could be almost anything: Cash we can use only at one local restaurant, cash cards for Wal-Mart or other chain stores, babysitting dollars we can trade in our neighborhoods.

There are some small examples of people of this future here now. In Japan, people trade “elder-care units,” which are measured in time spent caring for elders in the community, and they've become quite valuable as the population in that country ages. In the United States, hours of service are exchanged via the online Time Bank or locally in Ithaca, New York. Then there are the “Life Dollars,” an electronic currency used in the Pacific Northwest. The experiments have been successful, albeit quite small. The total amount of Ithaca hours in circulation is $100,000, while Life Dollars are used for perhaps $2,000 worth of transactions per month.

Newmark isn't sold on the "craigbucks" idea, but that isn't stopping Rushkoff. "If he doesn't want to do it, I can do it myself," he says with a laugh.

"The Future of Money: DIY Currencies"

Reader Mark points us to a rather disturbing story about Amazon canceling a customer's account for no clear reason, and in doing so, using DRM to turn his Kindle 2 device into a useless paperweight -- such that he couldn't even read the books he'd purchased. This is troubling on a variety of levels. First, it's worrisome that Amazon would just cancel this guy's account with no warning, no full explanation and no method to appeal the decision. Second, it's quite problematic that, in doing so, it would turn his expensive device into a useless box, while disabling ebooks he'd thought he'd "bought." Once again, we see how DRM, rather than "enabling business models" as those who support it insist, tends to only serve to harm legitimate customers.

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Mordok-DestroyerOfWo writes "If a little-known but influential alliance of state politicians, large retailers, and tax collectors have their way, the days of tax-free Internet shopping may be nearly over. A bill expected to be introduced in the US Congress as early as Monday would rewrite the ground rules for mail order and Internet sales by eliminating what its supporters view as a 'loophole' that, in many cases, allows Americans to shop over the Internet without paying sales taxes."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Darren sez, "A pastor (of all people) gets pulled over in Arizona at an internal anti-terrorism checkpoint and refuses to submit to a vehicular search (as per his fourth amendment rights). Hilarity ensues as authorities break his car windows with hammers and shoot him with a taser."

Baptist pastor beaten + tazed by Border patrol - 11 stitches (Thanks, Darren!)

Last December, guitarist Joe Satriani sued Coldplay for copyright infringement over a similar sounding melody. The story generated a lot of discussion here, as people dug up countless examples of other songs with similar melodies (some predating Satriani's tune) to support the argument that it might just be a natural melody to sing over the chords. The lawsuit resurfaced in the news around the Grammys, with Coldplay calling it "ridiculous" and Satriani making an emotional case ("I felt like a dagger went right through my heart. It hurt so much..."). Techdirt reader GK points to the news that, last week, Coldplay's lawyers submitted a federal court filing arguing that any similarities between the two songs were not significant enough to warrant damages. It looks like this may actually go to trial since Satriani is demanding "any and all profits" and Coldplay is standing its ground, but GK suspects that they'll likely reach a settlement in the end, "offering Satriani a sense of vindication and Coldplay a quieter option for laying the thing to rest." That seems to be what Satriani wants.

If this really is a case of independent creation, it's troubling how difficult that would be to prove. In the comments of our original piece, several people noted the case of Bright Tunes v. Harrisongs in which a judge ruled that George Harrison had infringed another song through "unconscious copying" -- not intentionally, but by accidentally using a melody he'd heard elsewhere and had stored in his unconscious memory. The problem with "unconscious copying" and unintentional copyright infringement of a melody is that it undermines the independent creation defense and creates a pretty broad scope for what could be construed as copyright infringement in songwriting. Basically, any melody that sounds significantly similar to another might be considered "copied," even though that happens all the time in music. Plus, it's not like a similar sounding melody in a completely different song is harmful to the "original;" it's not like people are listening to Coldplay's song instead of Satriani's, or that one tune is impacting the commercial potential of the other. There is no functional equivalency in art.

The Harrison case is well-entrenched, but if Coldplay is intent on clearing its name, the case may offer the courts a chance to rethink the decision (or to re-affirm it...). Though, so far Coldplay's lawyers seem to be using a de minimis copying defense, arguing that any similarities are insignificant, rather than focusing on independent creation. At any rate, this could be a precedent-setting case... but don't hold your breath. In the end, it may well just be easier for Coldplay to pay up, settle and make it go away.

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

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Mike writes "Kyocera recently unveiled a kinetic energy-powered phone with a flexible OLED display that can be folded up like a wallet. Dubbed the EOS phone, the display unfolds to reveal a wide screen, and shape memory allows the phone's keys to pop up when in use and blend in with the surface during downtime. Best of all, the phone's soft, semi-rigid polymer skin is embedded with an array of tiny piezoelectric generators — the more you use the phone, the more it charges!" So far, it's just a design idea — but a cool one.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Mike writes "Kyocera recently unveiled a kinetic energy-powered phone with a flexible OLED display that can be folded up like a wallet. Dubbed the EOS phone, the display unfolds to reveal a wide screen, and shape memory allows the phone's keys to pop up when in use and blend in with the surface during downtime. Best of all, the phone's soft, semi-rigid polymer skin is embedded with an array of tiny piezoelectric generators — the more you use the phone, the more it charges!" So far, it's just a design idea — but a cool one.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Like many other people, I've always thought an old church would be an interesting place to convert into a home. Maybe a stay in a monastery that's now a posh hotel would satisfy my curiosity. Intelligent Life Magazine takes a tour of a few of them around the world. Monasteries: The Latest Boutique Hotels

Adrian Mann has built what's being called the world's largest piano, measuring in at over 18.5 feet long! He began work on the project at the age of 16 and continued construction in a local barn over the next four years. It seems all his hard work was worth it considering the instruments commanding voice. [via Noise Addicts]

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Instructables member somebullcrap was inspired by scientists who study ant hills by filling them up with metal, so he made a table using the same process. He says, "I set out to build a table designed by ants using left over, unused, and unwated things (like) a jigsaw found in the trash, aluminum cans, warped wood and salvaged glass, just to name a few." aNtistic design

Over on Offworld, our Brandon's discovered paleo-reportage about the miraculous virtual worlds available to young people who avail themselves of the NES and Super Mario -- anchored by an agog Bill O'Reilly who can only shake his head and marvel at kids today and the crazy stuff they get up to.

Bill O'Reilly and his Peabody Polk award winning crew at Inside Edition report on the emerging world of Nintendo, at a time when the Mario name meant Puzo more than plumber.

As a bonus, a look behind the scenes at Game Counselor HQ, and another teasing glance at that gold-covered 'Zelda Tips and Tactics' booklet that used to sing its (too expensive for a pre-teen) siren song to me from every. single. issue. of Nintendo Power.

Video: Bill O'Reilly gets wise to Super Mario Discuss this on Boing Boing Offworld

After the surprising rejection of Nicholas Sarkozy's "three strikes" law in France to kick file sharers off the internet, Sarkozy and the bill's supporters have decided to bring the law back for another vote on April 29th. While plenty of politicians and consumer groups have urged supporters not to resubmit the bill, Sarkozy apparently will hear nothing of it, insisting that this bill is somehow necessary to "protect creative diversity." Can we ask how? What does kicking people off the internet have to do with creative diversity? It's the same question we asked when U2's manager seemed to think that kicking people off the internet would get people to buy music again. It's fantasy thinking. You don't force people to buy a product they don't want to pay for. It's not clear why so many people think that kicking people off the internet is a viable business model for the recording industry.

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Today on Offworld, Ragdoll Metaphysics columnist Jim Rossignol takes a deeper look at the recently much-hyped promises of "cloud gaming" services like OnLive and Gaikai -- who suggest that the days of buying powerful home processing hardware are numbered if our games were processed on the cloud and delivered via video streaming -- and a look at what questions and concerns remain when the fantastic claims seem more reasonable in a few years time. We also took a technical look into the five year development of Maxis' Spore via an exhaustive set of "liner notes" written by technology lead Chris Hecker (seen left, his very first created Spore creature) as well as art director Ocean Quigley's own blog, and played Don't Save The Princess, today's best indie PC game. Elsewhere we saw Bill O'Reilly discover the new world of Nintendo via a 1988 broadcast, imagined how Bioshock should have ended, saw a fantastic new LUA hack for Super Mario Bros 3 where all control of the game is given to painted-on rainbow stripes, and ordered a set of ruggish Pac-Man half-sized knuckle dusters. Finally, we played a game where Daft Punk seek their samples stolen by rival electro-duo Justice, pre-ordered adorable official Bubble Bobble shirts and ordered more wearables via the new Edge magazine shop, and, best of all, watched the latest video from pop duo Boy in Static created entirely with TextEdit and ancient .gif clipart -- and then played a game based on the same.

A Viennese tourist has vowed never to return to London after police officers forced him to delete photos he'd taken of the Vauxhall bus station, saying it was "strictly forbidden" and recording details from his identity papers. There's no evidence that terrorists use photos to plan their attacks, nor that preventing photography reduces the likelihood of a terrorist attack. London's police have been granted sweeping "anti-terrorism" powers, including the authority to arrest people who take pictures of the police.

But the tourists have said they had to return home to Vienna without their holiday pictures after two policemen forced them to delete the photographs from their cameras in the name of preventing terrorism.

Matkza, a 69-year-old retired television cameraman with a taste for modern architecture, was told that photographing anything to do with transport was "strictly forbidden". The policemen also recorded the pair's details, including passport numbers and hotel addresses.

In a letter in today's Guardian, Matzka wrote: "I understand the need for some sensitivity in an era of terrorism, but isn't it naive to think terrorism can be prevented by terrorising tourists?"

The Metropolitan police said it was investigating the allegations.

In a telephone interview from his home in Vienna, Matka said: "I've never had these experiences anywhere, never in the world, not even in Communist countries."

Police delete London tourists' photos 'to prevent terrorism' (Thanks, Matt!)

(Image: Vauxhall Station, a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike photo from Nedrichards' photostream)

coondoggie writes "Getting spacecraft traveling at hypersonic speeds to slow down and land or achieve a particular orbit on a dime is no easy feat. But researchers are developing a tool that will let engineers model and ultimately build advanced flight control systems that meld balloon and parachute technologies known as a ballute (BALLoon-parachUTE). Basically a ballute is a large, inflatable device that takes advantage of atmospheric drag to decelerate and capture a spacecraft into orbit around a planet, according to NASA who is funding Global Aerospace to build such a tool."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Pocket_lucho builds some excellent pint-sized arcade cabinets using PSOne LCDs and controls from inexpensive all-in-one consoles. Beyond the electronics, the real star ingredients here are the wood panels, carefully crafted for that classic cabinet feel. More images available on the original forum post (translation).

[via Hack a Day]

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Here is a really nice piece of stop motion animation using photo prints displayed in a room and then re-photographed. (Thanks, Kirsten Anderson!)

Ross Lovegrove created this lovely high-end bamboo bicycle for Danish bike/design firm Biomega, founded by my pal Jens Martin Skibsted, and it will be available for purchase next month. If you're in Milan, you can see it in person at the Design Library next week. Even better, bring your own bike to the Library at 11am on Thursday (4/23) and go for a ride with Lovegrove and Skibsted! More on Biomega here, or if you'd like details on the bike, Martin says you can email the company directly.

Attorneys for the recently-legally-beleaguered artist Shepard Fairey have filed a countersuit against the Associated Press over claims Fairey violated intellectual property rights in creating the iconic Obama poster. Fairey and his supporters argue that his work falls squarely within the boundaries of transformation and fair use. PDFs of the counterclaim documents below, at the bottom of this blog post.

The source close to Fairey's legal affairs who passed these directs our attention to a section which, in their words, "illustrates the hypocrisy of the AP." This section documents a number of instances in which Shepard's defense argues the AP has published -- and profited from -- Fairey's work, and that of other artists, without obtaining a license.

# On January 7, 2009 The AP distributed a story entitled "Iconic Obama portrait headed to Smithsonian museum" by Brett Zongker. The AP's article included a photograph attributed to The AP, which depicted Fairey's Obama Hope Stencil Collage that now hangs in the National Portrait Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution. (A copy of the full article is attached as Exhibit A and available at [link].) The AP did not obtain a license to use Fairey's work in this photograph. As shown below, the photograph attributed to The AP consists of nothing more than a literal reproduction of Fairey's work.

# The AP's image database contains the following photograph of Jeff Koons' sculpture entitled Ushering In Banality. On information and belief, The AP did not obtain a license to use Koons' work in this photograph.

# The AP's image database contains the following photograph of George Segal's The Diner. On information and belief, The AP did not obtain a license to use Segal's work in this photograph.

# The AP's image database contains the following photograph of Banksy's Di-Faced Notes. On information and belief, The AP did not obtain a license to use Banksy's work in this photograph.

# The AP's image database contains the following photograph of Keith Haring's Hope. On information and belief, The AP did not obtain a license to use Haring's work in this photograph.

(...) # The doctrine of unclean hands and basic principles of equity prohibit The AP from contending that Counterclaim Defendants' Obama Works infringe The AP's copyrights when The AP itself exploits the copyrighted work of Fairey and other artists without permission and in a manner that is far less transformative than the Obama Works, as illustrated but not limited to, the photographs listed above.

SHEPARD FAIREY and OBEY GIANT ART, INC., Plaintiffs, -against- THE ASSOCIATED PRESS, Defendant and Counterclaim Plaintiff, -against- SHEPARD FAIREY, OBEY GIANT ART, INC., OBEY GIANT LLC and STUDIO NUMBER ONE, INC.

* ANSWER AND AFFIRMATIVE DEFENSES (PDF)
* Shepard Fairey vs. AP: Answer, Exhibit A (PDF)

Update: A statement from the Associated Press follows, after the jump.

Paul Colford, Director of Media Relations for The Associated Press, emailed this statement to Boing Boing:

Statement from The Associated Press:

The Associated Press is still in the process of reviewing Mr. Fairey's response to its Counterclaims, but it is very revealing that rather than present any evidence to justify his own obvious misappropriation of the AP's copyrighted work, he instead focuses on making collateral attacks on the AP, one of the oldest and largest news organizations in the world, regarding standard newsgathering activities. Even more disappointing is the fact that Mr. Fairey appears to have deliberately omitted from his filing information regarding the newsgathering context in which the various images were generated and in which they are used. We note that Mr. Fairey admits that he engaged in the hypocritical conduct discussed in the AP's Counterclaims, including using the work of others without obtaining a license while at the same time threatening others for using his own works.

Instructables user tikka308 writes:

Because HVAC units use a lot of energy (particularly when in 'air conditioning' mode during hot summer months) and renters do not have the ability to easily implement energy star (i.e. more efficient) units or to regulate their tempature, I wanted to find a way, without making permanent changes, to control an HVAC unit like a thermostat! Implementing this device can not only save you money, but can help maintain a more steady-temperature in your apartment, reduce energy consumption and help reduce the strain placed on our nations power grid during the hot summer months!

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explosivejared writes "Humans don't always make the most rational decisions. As studies have shown, even when logic and reasoning point in one direction, sometimes we chose the opposite route, motivated by personal bias or simply 'wishful thinking.' This paradoxical human behavior has resisted explanation by classical decision theory for over a decade. But now, scientists have shown that a quantum probability model can provide a simple explanation for human decision-making — and may eventually help explain the success of human cognition overall."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

With all of the iPhone App Store press love these days, it's almost easy to forget that Apple refused to allow any outside apps on the phone when it first launched -- instead, telling developers that anything they wanted to do can and should be done via a browser, creating mini-apps that were all web-technology-based. Of course, now that the App Store gets so much attention, plenty of folks have forgotten about designing web-based apps for the iPhone... but not everyone. Google has designed a new version of Gmail that routes around Apple's command-and-control App Store process by going direct via the web. While the article linked here seems to make this out to be a big deal, it seems like the only really big deal is the fact that everyone forgot this was the way Apple originally planned for apps to be handled on the phone.

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Seth Robinson writes:

I enjoy throwing the ball for my Rat Terrier, Maple, every afternoon, but I injured my shoulder a while back and some days it can be of painful. Naturally, as a maker I wondered if there was a "better" way to throw a tennis ball. I'd seen similar projects before, notably the popular YouTube video with the too-cute daschund, and reckoned I should give it a try.

This catapult-style tennis ball launcher is my first attempt. I'm sure there's an engineering principle that covers this kind of machine, but I am uninformed, so bear with me. The shredder motor winds the elastic band until it gains enough potential energy to start the arm moving. Once the arm starts, it accelerates quickly and slams into the forward stop, throwing the ball. I have fitted the arm with a second, weaker elastic band which tensions as the arm reaches the forward stop. When the direction of the motor is reversed, the tension is released from the main elastic band, allowing the second band to return the arm to its resting position.

Except for the wood frame, the launcher is made of scavenged parts from:

• dead paper shredder
• old SCSI scanner
• Theraband that my Physical Therapist gave me (yep, shoulder)
• slingshot-style tennis ball launcher
• Chuckit tennis ball thrower
• 55 gallon plastic barrel
• cardboard box

I threw the whole thing together in about 2 hours and was surprised when it worked on the first try. The ball currently travels about 30 feet, which is far from ideal as my goal is 200 feet. Relays are on the way for the motor control and I have a Make Controller sitting here waiting for firmware.

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United Airlines has a new policy that would make large people buy two seats, if a flight attendant can't find two open seats together. The carrier is the latest of several airlines to adopt this policy.

The carrier, whose parent company is Chicago-based UAL Corp., said it decided to adopt the tougher policy after receiving more than 700 complaints last year from passengers "who did not have a comfortable flight because the person next to them infringed on their seat," spokeswoman Robin Urbanski said.

United Airlines could require obese passengers to buy a second ticket

A 26-year-old man living in India is said to resemble a baby in every way, the exception being his set of adult teeth. Jerly Lyngdoh is 2ft 9in long and weighs 22 lbs. Doctors suspect his growth hormones are not working properly. (Via Arbroath)

Barence writes "Social news website Digg.com has made key changes to its recently introduced DiggBar. The browser add-on had been much criticised for its use of frames to "host" third-party websites within the digg.com domain using an obfuscating short URL, thereby boosting its own traffic figures to the detriment of those third parties. After many major sites ran negative articles on the DiggBar, and even changed their code to block it, Digg has relented and announced two changes to ease concerns."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ian bought a Kindle and some Kindle ebooks from Amazon. He also bought some real-world stuff from them, some of which he returned. Amazon decided that he'd returned too many things, so they suspended his Amazon account, which meant that he could no longer buy any Kindle books, and any Kindle subscriptions he's paid for stop working.

After some phone calls, Amazon granted him a one-time exception and lit his account up again.

Leaving aside losing your subscriptions, this would not be such a big deal if the Kindle had graceful ways of putting competitors' ebooks on your device. What's your experience getting non-Kindle books onto the Kindle?

Amazon has banned my account - my Kindle is now a (partial) brick. (via Consumerist)

The good people at Evil Mad Scientist Labs continue to break new ground with this Missile Command poodle skirt, a smashing addition to any spring wardrobe and perfect for sock-hops.

Missile Command Circle Skirt

Ian Lamont writes "A Microsoft-sponsored report that describes a hidden "Apple tax" has fallen flat among the technology press. Roger Kay's report (PDF) compares various PC and Mac configurations, and claims an all-Apple household's costs would add up to an extra $3,367 over five years. Tech columnists and bloggers have slammed the comparisons and claims made in the report — even Mac-baiter John C. Dvorak calls it propaganda. However, some Mac fans still see a pro-Microsoft press conspiracy. Even if the comparisons are questionable, Kay's report and the accompanying television ads have clearly struck a nerve among the Mac faithful." Meanwhile Linux users everywhere are scratching their heads.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Joe Mullin has been digging into the saga of Gregory Bender -- a guy no one seems to know anything about, but who just a few weeks ago started suing some big name companies, such as Broadcom, Freescale, AMD and National Semiconductor for patent infringement. A week later, he had also sued IBM, Agilent, Cirrus Logic, Siemens, Nokia, Sony, Motorola, and ST Microelectronics. Apparently that wasn't enough, as a week later, he filed new lawsuits against AT&T, AT&T Mobility, Sony-Ericsson, Panasonic, Samsung, Toshiba, Hitachi, Seagate and Western Digital. At latest count, in the last month or so, he's filed 22 lawsuits against 28 different companies.

The patent in question? It's for a buffered transconductance amplifier, and Bender is claiming that basically all computers, mobile phones, hard drives, DVD players, HDTVs and MRI machines violate the patents. Bender may or may not have a valid claim... but the patent was granted in 1992, and it appears it will expire at the beginning of August, so it's not entirely clear why Bender waited until now to sue -- or what he's been doing with his life in the interim. Mullin's questions concerning that were answered with a: "He is a private person. He does not want publicity." Then, perhaps he shouldn't have sued pretty much every high tech company out there claiming they owe him money...

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I'm writing this sitting in a cafe in Harvard Sq drinking coffee and enjoying the beginnning of the day. No newspaper to read, just my netbook, a net connection and my own thoughts.

Doc Searls likes to say that markets are conversations, but people are conversations too. I have no way of knowing for sure how it is for other people, but inside me is a constant back and forth chatter, with lots of different voices, each expressing opinions of minor and major events that take place all around us (i.e. me).

It's all those different voices that come up with ideas, collaboratively -- we're like a 24 hour group brainstorming session.

The sticker on the back of my computer says MEAN PEOPLE SUCK. Maybe not such a great sticker. I find it attracts attention, but not many comments. I've seen people leer at me, not sure what to make of it. The stupid thing is they all seem, at least to me, to be mean. I imagine the conversation that never actually takes place to go like this: Is that about me? asks the mean person pointing to my sticker. I say "Sure I knew I'd run into you in the cafe or airport even though we've never met and I wanted to be sure I didn't have to talk to you, now go away." I think maybe I'll look for a new sticker!

Had a thought maybe FriendFeed ought to put a layer on their app to make it a blogging tool. They'd still have the UI they have now, but it would be a back-end. Then I could use it to host a blog with comments, sort of an alternative to wordpress.com. If I were them I might go this route if they're getting tired of being compared to the Twitter juggernaut. Maybe they could be seen as breathing new life into the blogging market, making it more "real time" perhaps.

One of the reasons I don't like reading newspapers these days is that they're all about Twitter. I'm so tired of hearing how great Twitter is. It's a sore spot for me, cause they get all the glory, and there's nothing but boredom for me, a two-plus-year tireless Twitterer. I used to feel Twitter was exciting. Now all the news on Twitter is about how much money they're worth, and how many followers some Hollywood asshole has, and isn't it funny that CNN didn't even know they didn't own the CNNBRK account, and isn't it even funnier that they got all those followers from Twitter putting them on the SUL and how much you want to bet they didn't know it wasn't really CNN behind it either.

I shake my head. It's so seat-of-the-pants. They run a nascent media empire like it was Biz's personal blog. Where do I fit into their big plan? Nowhere. Obviously. It totally reminds me of the time when Netscape ruled the browser biz. We need at least a two-party system. This thing is dying. I know it doesn't seem that way to the company and its investors, good for them. But it sure feels that way to me.

You do understand that a blog is a personal thing right? Your mileage may vary and you may have a different opinion. I'm under no obligation to see it your way, and vice versa.

Anyway, I'm having a fine time on this east coast schmoozing trip. The weather is pretty good, kind of cold for mid-April, but it's not raining, and the crispness makes it nice to walk around, and I'm doing lots of that. I met a future President of the United States yesterday (he's still just three months old). I have a few meetings in Cambridge this morning and then I'm on the 3PM train from Boston to Penn Station, and tomorrow night I get to see the Mets play in their new stadium before heading back to Calif on Saturday morning.

jeet writes "Data centers are boring and NOCs are doubly so. But this one sure beats all of them. Found this video of a data center suited for james bond villain on Data Center Knowledge website. The facility is established in a hydrogen bomb safe bunker and has generators used in German submarines. The CEO takes you around and shows some other cool features."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

By way of the fine folks at Boing Boing comes word of this awesome site featuring dozens of papercraft spaceship models from the Wing Commander series of games, from the main Wing Commander titles, through Privateer, and spin-offs like Armada.

Paper Commander

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Coinciding with NYC's Bent Festival Handmade Music initiates an especially hacked event tonight at 3rd Ward in Brooklyn. The free event features a pretty amazing lineup including -

“modular synth meets circuit-bent Barbie dolls. noise, drone, dance party with Peter Edwards of Casper Electronics.” -

A surprise mystery instrument(s) from Handmade Music superstar Ranjit Bhatnagar, who promises it’ll be “something weird.” -

CDM captain Peter Kirn shows you how to have fun with Radio Shack contact mics and using water for music-making.

E-Squared churn out homemade analog synthesis featuring the unique hardware stylings of Mr. Eric Archer -

Plus - Jamie Allen and Jo Kazuhiro talking about the circuitry, the music, and the magic of the Chiptune Marching Band -

Free beer courtesy Pabst Blue Ribbon, while it lasts!

Handmade Music on Facebook

3rd Ward
195 Morgan Ave
Brooklyn, NY 11237
Map

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Mike writes "The sunny state of Florida just announced that they will begin construction this year on the world's first solar-powered city. A collaboration between Florida Power & Light and development firm Kitson & Partners, the 17,000 acre city will generate all of its electrical needs via a 75 megawatt, $300 million solar-powered generator. The city will also use smart grid technology to manage its power and allow all inhabitants of the community to monitor their energy consumption."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The "MAKEcationing" Phillip was on PBS' Planet Forward program, talking up he and Limore's Tweet-a-Watt (which'll be a featured project in MAKE, Volume 18, BTW).

Twittering power meter

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There's been plenty of debate about traffic cameras lately, with many cities and states rushing to implement them as revenue generators rather than out of any sense of safety. Reader Brad points us to a story out of Duncanville, Texas, where a city councilman spoke up at a city council meeting opposing current red light camera laws, and the mayor had him arrested and removed during the meeting. The story presented at the link may be a bit one-sided (so there may certainly be more to this story), but the council member felt that the redlight cameras were unfair -- and that there were other, better ways for the city to meet its budget. Apparently, the mayor told him if he continued to debate the issue, he would be arrested... and then lived up to that threat. Who knew redlight cameras could be so controversial that speaking out against them could get you arrested?

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Gamespot is running a feature looking into the facts behind gaming addiction: what it is, whether it exists, and why the need still exists for objective research into the issue. Quoting: "[Richard M. Ryan, a psychologist and professor of psychology, psychiatry, and education at the University of Rochester in New York] thinks the lack of quality research into video game overuse will be rectified with time as games become more sophisticated in the ways they satisfy people's psychological needs. 'We have a lot of people, some in the media and some in the sciences, who are too ready to make very strong claims about video games, whether we are talking about aggression, addiction, or cultural estrangement, based on very little evidence. I think that is especially how the media often sells stories. Some commentators exaggerate risks, and on the other hand there are defenders of games who deny any and all problems and attack any perceived bad news. Games are relatively new in our culture, and such vacillation between hysteria and denial I suspect often greets any new phenomenon, from hip-hop to the Internet to video games. Both sides usually have some part of the truth, but it may be a while before at least we as scientists, much less as a society, have a coherent understanding.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This will comes as little surprise to most people, but it turns out that the NSA has been abusing its surveillance powers, collecting significantly more information than they are allowed to by Congress. Of course, we got a hint of this last year when an NSA whistleblower revealed how the NSA regularly tracked information it wasn't supposed to be tracking. And, of course, we've yet to see a secretive gov't program yet that hasn't been abused in some way. National Security Letters? FBI abused it. Warrantless wiretapping? Abused. So we should certainly be questioning why the administration is claiming that there shouldn't be oversight over any such programs, when history has shown that they have been, and will continue to be, abused.

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With all the stories of police getting worried about new technologies, it's always good to see cases where they seem to be using them appropriately. Rick recently wrote in to point out a story where police in Maine used Craigslist to track down a prostitution ring. Compare that to others who have been blaming Craigslist for prostitution. And, now we're seeing stories about some police departments that are actively using Twitter either to send out emergency alerts to people, or to better connect with the community they're supposed to be protecting. Of course, that story worries about "impostors," but there are ways to deal with that issue. For police looking to make use of the technology, it can be quite useful, and it's great to see some actually realizing that and embracing the technology.

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With all the stories of police getting worried about new technologies, it's always good to see cases where they seem to be using them appropriately. Rick recently wrote in to point out a story where police in Maine used Craigslist to track down a prostitution ring. Compare that to others who have been blaming Craigslist for prostitution. And, now we're seeing stories about some police departments that are actively using Twitter either to send out emergency alerts to people, or to better connect with the community they're supposed to be protecting. Of course, that story worries about "impostors," but there are ways to deal with that issue. For police looking to make use of the technology, it can be quite useful, and it's great to see some actually realizing that and embracing the technology.

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Idiomatick writes "Bell Canada is attempting to impose UBB on its wholesale customers. As Bell was given a last-mile monopoly in much of Canada by the government, they are required to follow rules set up by the CRTC; this includes leasing their lines to competitive ISPs. And they are given a directive by the CRTC to provide competitive speeds to said ISPs. Teksavvy has informed its customers that were this to go through, the current monthly cap would be quartered and the cost for exceeding it would be 'multiple times more than our current per Gigabyte rate of $0.25/GB on overages.' They have also helpfully included a link where you can send your comments/concerns to the CRTC directly."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Idiomatick writes "Bell Canada is attempting to impose UBB on it's wholesale customers. As Bell was given a last-mile monopoly in much of Canada by the government they are required to follow rules set up by the CRTC this includes leasing their lines to competitive ISPs. And they are given a directive by the CRTC to provide competitive speeds to said ISPs. Teksavvy has informed it's customers that were this to go through the current monthly cap would be quartered and the cost for exceeding it would be "multiple times more than our current per Gigabyte rate of $0.25/GB on overages". They have also helpfully included a link where you can send your comments/concerns to the CRTC directly."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Matt sez, "'Shared Worlds' is a great summer writing workshop for creative kids with an interest in fantasy and science fiction."

Shared Worlds, an innovative two week workshop in fantasy and science fiction worldbuilding is currently seeking applications for attendance from students grade eight to twelve who have an interest in creative writing and fantasy worldbuilding.

The program is held from July 19 through August 1 on the campus of Wofford College in Spartanburg, SC, and offers an intensely creative atmosphere in which students learn all aspects of building their own fictional world through instruction in creative writing, history, art, philosophy and physics and then apply that knowledge by creating fiction, games and more.

This year's instructors include assistant director and two time World Fantasy Award winning author Jeff VanderMeer, Weird Tales fiction editor Ann VanderMeer, role playing game designer Will Hindmarch, Spiderwick Chronicles creator Holly Black and New York Times bestselling author Tobias Buckell, plus Wofford College's own Dr. Christine Dinkins, philosophy professor, and Jeremy Jones, lecturer and camp director.

Although the emphasis of this think tank for teens is on fantasy, according to Jeff VanderMeer the things that the participants learn will be very useful in real life.

Take Part in one of the Summer's Most Innovative Creative Writing Programs for Teens. (Thanks, Matt!)

Avi sez, "Paper Commander offers free downloadable pdfs of plans for paper models of cool spaceships from the Wing Commander universe. My favorite is the F-109 Vampire."

Paper Commander (Thanks, Avi!)

James sez, "James Montgomery Flagg, the guy who painted the famous Uncle Sam recruitment poster also penned a series of comics in the early 1900's called Nervy Nat. The folks at ASIFA posted a bunch, and the first, 'Nervy Nat as an Aeronaut' features a boozy Nat sailing to Venus in a Zeppelin."

Cartooning: James Montgomery Flagg's Nervy Nat (Thanks, James!)

Not all the Somali "pirates" are gangsters: some are locals who've watched their loved ones sicken and die after European toxic waste was dropped on their shores and decided to do something about it.

Yes: nuclear waste. As soon as the government was gone, mysterious European ships started appearing off the coast of Somalia, dumping vast barrels into the ocean. The coastal population began to sicken. At first they suffered strange rashes, nausea and malformed babies. Then, after the 2005 tsunami, hundreds of the dumped and leaking barrels washed up on shore. People began to suffer from radiation sickness, and more than 300 died.

Ahmedou Ould-Abdallah, the UN envoy to Somalia, tells me: "Somebody is dumping nuclear material here. There is also lead, and heavy metals such as cadmium and mercury - you name it." Much of it can be traced back to European hospitals and factories, who seem to be passing it on to the Italian mafia to "dispose" of cheaply. When I asked Mr Ould-Abdallah what European governments were doing about it, he said with a sigh: "Nothing. There has been no clean-up, no compensation, and no prevention."

At the same time, other European ships have been looting Somalia's seas of their greatest resource: seafood. We have destroyed our own fish stocks by overexploitation - and now we have moved on to theirs. More than $300m-worth of tuna, shrimp, and lobster are being stolen every year by illegal trawlers. The local fishermen are now starving. Mohammed Hussein, a fisherman in the town of Marka 100km south of Mogadishu, told Reuters: "If nothing is done, there soon won't be much fish left in our coastal waters."

This is the context in which the "pirates" have emerged. Somalian fishermen took speedboats to try to dissuade the dumpers and trawlers, or at least levy a "tax" on them. They call themselves the Volunteer Coastguard of Somalia - and ordinary Somalis agree. The independent Somalian news site WardheerNews found 70 per cent "strongly supported the piracy as a form of national defence".

No, this doesn't make hostage-taking justifiable, and yes, some are clearly just gangsters - especially those who have held up World Food Programme supplies. But in a telephone interview, one of the pirate leaders, Sugule Ali: "We don't consider ourselves sea bandits. We consider sea bandits [to be] those who illegally fish and dump in our seas."

Johann Hari: You are being lied to about pirates (via Isen)

One of the big complaints with the current patent system is the amount of time it takes for an application to actually go through the process of approval. Supporters of the patent system often insist that the "solution" is to fund the Patent Office with more money so it can hire a lot more examiners. Of course, this suggests that the problem is a linear one, and it can be fixed by just throwing money and bodies at the problem -- when there's little evidence that's the case. Some of us have always believed that the real way to fix the problem is to bring the patent system much closer to its original purpose, where patents were the exception, only to be used in exceptional cases where other incentives wouldn't do the job. However, over in Europe they seem to think there's a third way: better automating the patent process. A European consortium has been working on something called "PATExpert," which they describe as using "semantic web" technologies. Unfortunately, details aren't particularly forthcoming, and for all the talk of the "semantic web" over the years, it's been little more than buzzwords and hype from what we've seen. Throw in the word paradigm, and you have to wonder if what's been built does anything even remotely useful:

"The greatest success of PATExpert has been to initiate the change of the paradigm currently followed in patent processing services from textual to semantic."

It would be great if someone could explain that in plain English, because it sounds like gibberish trying to sound intelligent. But, back on point, it's hard to see how any "automated" system would actually help in the process of approving patents. Considering how many mistakes are made and bad patents allowed through, I'd worry that automating the process is only likely to create significantly more problems.

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Here's a talk I gave earlier this year at the O'Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing conference in NYC, about the way that DRM gives distributors control over publishers and writers. This talk went down very well, and is the source of "Doctorow's Law," which a lot of people have asked me about: "Any time someone puts a lock on something you own, against your wishes, and doesn't give you the key, it's not being done to your benefit."

There's some errata here, though: the Overdrive debacle was due to a licensing dispute, not a bankruptcy; and there's now a "DRM-free" option for the Kindle, but I can't find out if the file comes with legal encumbrances that would prevent people who buy one of these from moving it to a competing device (no one at Amazon will answer my queries about this). And I've also been told by Amazon that supposedly Audible will do DRM-free audiobooks, but they haven't answered repeated queries about the details of this.

TOC 09 "Digital Distribution and the Whip Hand: Don't Get iTunesed with your eBooks"

On Dinosaurs and Robots I wrote about an automatic chicken coop door I built over the weekend.

MAKE and CRAFT are now offering up daily tips via Twitter using @make_tips and @craft_tips respectively. Every day get a new tip about something under the MAKE umbrella. You can even suggest tips by sending make_tips an @ reply! We'll be sending out the best little nuggets of information that help you make your projects better, faster, stronger. Follow make_tips on your Twitter!

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Congratulations to Wired editor Chris Anderson and Jordi Muñoz for for winning SparkFun's Autonomous Vehicle Competition today in Boulder, Colo. Their winning entry was a DIY Drone with GPS and digital compass navigation, which flew around the course in a little over thirty seconds.

Second place went to Team Mookemobile for their Deathpod 3000, which was the only other vehicle (out of 15 in the race) that made it around the entire course.

I'm writing an article about the exciting event for a future issue of MAKE, and you can be sure I'll let you know as soon as it's in print.

Maggie Koerth-Baker is a guest blogger on Boing Boing. A freelance science and health journalist, Maggie lives in Minneapolis, brain dumps on Twitter, and writes quite often for mental_floss magazine.

So one of the chapters in Be Amazing is dedicated to teaching you how to be a better mooch. Naturally, the focus is on parasites.

Just focus on that cute little, panhandling filarial worm, while I tell you about something far less adorable.

Sacculina are one of those creatures that are both absolutely fascinating and also relatively decent evidence against the existence of a loving deity. Think of them as nature's equivalent of Dracula, on the hunt for a Renfield.

Actually more of a barnacle with a parasitic bent, the sacculina starts out life as a weensy, free-floating organism, swimming about the seas. Although she spends her early life footloose and fancy-free, what the female sacculina really wants is to meet a nice crab and settle down. What the crab wants never really factors into the equation.

Once she finds a suitable crab, the sacculina swims around to the belly of the shellfish and, using a sharp hollow point on her exoskeleton, injects herself into the crab's flesh, leaving behind an empty husk. Inside the crab, the sacculina begins to take over, burrowing long, nutrient-sucking tendrils into every part of the crab's anatomy, from the eyestalks to the claws. As she does this, the sacculina changes the crab's behavior; effectively neutering it, preventing it from growing and winnowing down its once-vast list of interests to a single hobby: Eating. After the sacculina picks up a mate or two, the crab will even spend what little energy resources it has helping to tend her baby parasites and giving them a good start in the world. Now entirely under her control, the crab ends up living only to serve the sacculina and help her and her family infect other crabs.

Image courtesy Michael Rogalski

1sockchuck writes "The heat generated by thousands of servers at the new Telehouse West data center in London will soon be used to heat nearby houses and businesses. The Greater London Authority has approved a plan in which waste heat from the colocation facility will be used in a district heat network for the local Docklands community. The project is expected to produce up to nine megawatts of power for the local community."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Maggie Koerth-Baker is a guest blogger on Boing Boing. A freelance science and health journalist, Maggie lives in Minneapolis, brain dumps on Twitter, and writes quite often for mental_floss magazine.

This is totally going to lead to a flame-war with PETA, isn't it?

For the record, I am not advocating running out and killing you off a species. No, not even S. coleoptrata. I see these as sort-of cautionary tales of how human plans can go horribly, horribly wrong for the denizens of the animal kingdom. Yes, this is an excerpt from Be Amazing, but one can learn the art of fabulosity from the mistakes of others, as well as from their triumphs.

That disclaimer accomplished, let's get on to the good stuff.

Method 1: Through Gluttony
There used to be hundreds of thousands of giant tortoises roaming (slowly) about South America's Galapagos Islands. Today, there are roughly 15,000. What can we say? Turtles are tasty. In the 16th and 17th centuries, the Galapagos were the swashbuckler's equivalent of a 7-Eleven--the last chance to stock up on food before hitting the vast emptiness of the Pacific. Besides being sluggish and docile (i.e., easy to catch) the tortoises could also survive for up to a year without food or water. Sailors often captured hundreds at a time, stacked them on their backs and, thus, had fresh meat all the way to India.

Method 2: Out of Sheer Hatred
Passenger pigeons once traveled around the United States in flocks so large, they could reportedly block out the sun over a town for eight hours. In the process, they gobbled down all the fruits and grains they could get their beaks on and left the "remains" for farmers to step in. All this made them rather ... unpopular. Throughout the 19th century, killing passenger pigeons was basically the national pastime. Baited with alcohol-soaked grain, gassed with sulfur fires and loaded live into trapshooting launchers (they were later replaced with clay "pigeons"), the passenger pigeon population quickly petered out. The last one died in the Cincinnati Zoo on Sept. 1, 1914.

Method 3: Via Tragicomic Irony
Collector and proto-environmentalist Rollo Beck visited the island of Guadalupe, off Baja California, on December 1, 1900. During the trip, he sighted a flock of nine Caracaras, a rare bird he wished to study (apparently in taxidermied form), and so he shot down all but two of them. Those two turned out to be the last Caracaras ever seen alive.

It's really sad about the Caracaras, but the passenger pigeons kind of had it coming.

Spokesperson for Mayor Gavin Newsom's office on a proposal that would make San Francisco the first city in the nation to sell and distribute medical marijuana:

"The mayor will have to hash this out with public health officials," press secretary Nathan Ballard said. "It's the mayor's job to weed out bad legislation. And to be blunt, this sounds pretty bad."

Mirkarimi proposal: Let S.F. sell medical pot (SF Gate, via Wayne's List)

Today's been a hectic day, so I'm behind in getting up this Maker Birthday tribute to probably the maker of all makers. To me, Leonardo is the ultimate example of what you might call the Bucky Fuller Challenge. In 1927, Fuller at 32, was suicidal. Instead of leaping from the bridge on which he stood, ready to take his life, he decided to give the rest of that life to the world, to challenge himself to see what "a single intelligence unit" could accomplish in a lifetime.

In my William Blake piece in the latest MAKE, I relate Blake's view that the human imagination is infinite, divine, and that we tragically hobble our access to that imagination and from all that we're capable of. When you look at giants like Da Vinci, William Blake, and Buckminster Fuller, it does give you pause to consider what we all might be able to accomplish if we could find full-on access to that current of imagination and innovation.

If you want to get a glimpse of what "Human Intelligence Unit Leonardo" was able to accomplish, check out the official Leonardo website (where all the pictures below came from). It is absolutely mind-boggling, page after page after page of jaw-dropping ideas, inventions, and staggeringly beautiful works of art. There's so much material here and good use of virtual walkthroughs, 3D models, hi-res photos, you could spend days on it. A fittingly-dense and attractive tribute to the man.

Here's the beginnings of the Wikipedia entry on Leonardo:

Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci (Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci, April 15, 1452 - May 2, 1519) was an Italian polymath, being a scientist, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, painter, sculptor, architect, botanist, musician and writer. Leonardo has often been described as the archetype of the renaissance man, a man whose unquenchable curiosity was equaled only by his powers of invention. He is widely considered to be one of the greatest painters of all time and perhaps the most diversely talented person ever to have lived. Helen Gardner says "The scope and depth of his interests were without precedent...His mind and personality seem to us superhuman, the man himself mysterious and remote".

Born as the illegitimate son of a notary, Piero da Vinci, and a peasant woman, Caterina, at Vinci in the region of Florence, Leonardo was educated in the studio of the renowned Florentine painter, Verrocchio. Much of his earlier working life was spent in the service of Ludovico il Moro in Milan. He later worked in Rome, Bologna and Venice and spent his last years in France, at the home awarded him by Francis I.

Leonardo was and is renowned primarily as a painter. Two of his works, the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper, are the most famous, most reproduced and most parodied portrait and religious painting of all time, respectively, their fame approached only by Michelangelo's Creation of Adam. Leonardo's drawing of the Vitruvian Man is also regarded as a cultural icon, being reproduced on everything from the Euro to text books to t-shirts. Perhaps fifteen of his paintings survive, the small number due to his constant, and frequently disastrous, experimentation with new techniques, and his chronic procrastination. Nevertheless, these few works, together with his notebooks, which contain drawings, scientific diagrams, and his thoughts on the nature of painting, comprise a contribution to later generations of artists only rivalled by that of his contemporary, Michelangelo.

Leonardo is revered for his technological ingenuity. He conceptualised a helicopter, a tank, concentrated solar power, a calculator, the double hull and outlined a rudimentary theory of plate tectonics. Relatively few of his designs were constructed or were even feasible during his lifetime, but some of his smaller inventions, such as an automated bobbin winder and a machine for testing the tensile strength of wire, entered the world of manufacturing unheralded. As a scientist, he greatly advanced the state of knowledge in the fields of anatomy, civil engineering, optics, and hydrodynamics.

And, our very own John Park points us to a site he did a few years back on Da Vinci's Kinematic Mechanisms:

I've been interested in creating reproductions of Leonardo da Vinci's machines and automata using 3D software for some time. I'll document the process here as a sort of loose tutorial in rigging mechanical devices.

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A new stat says that in March, visits to online classified ads represented almost 3 percent of web traffic, up 84 percent than the year-earlier figure. More than half of that growth occurred between January and March, and the company that tracked the stat credits people turning to the sites to sell their stuff to scrape together some cash for the growth. So if the growth of classified sites is booming, shouldn't that be good news for newspapers? It would be if they hadn't lost a lot of the online classified market to sites like Craigslist, whose simplicity, effectiveness and business model have attracted users in droves. So while newspaper execs lay the blame for their business' demise on Google, Craigslist might be a more worthy target. Except, of course, for the fact that Craigslist's success has been built on filling a space that the earlier leaders in classifieds -- the newspapers -- couldn't or wouldn't fill online.

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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Sixteen teams gathered today to determine whose autonomously-navigating vehicle would be the fastest around the Sparkfun headquarters in Boulder, CO.

Four-wheeled rovers (typically built on RC car platforms) dominated the entries, but there were three flying UAVs, and one spheroid ("labrat", pictured at right). One team was designing a tethered model rocket to fly the course, but, unfortunately, their entry didn't compete.

The race was structured as 3 heats. Each vehicle got 5 minutes to attempt a run; best time overall won.

The first heat got off to a rough start. About half of the robots made it to the first corner of the building, but only "Mookie Mobile Death Pod 3000" made it around the whole course.

A slight wind from the West seemed to be affecting the UAVs. They also had to deal with the multiple trees. The Boulder Fire Department was kind enough to help out with one, and others were low enough to get by hand. The DIY Drones plane found itself in multiple trees:

The ground-based vehicles had other obstacles to deal with, including curbs, and people who foolishly think that curbs are a safe place to stand.

After nearly hitting its creator, Mookie Mobile Death Pod 3000 goes after innocent bystanders:
Between rounds, people learned from the mistakes from previous runs, and tweaked their robots accordingly. Death Pod 3000, the only robot to complete the course in the first heat, solidified its lead in the second by lowering its time to 1:28. The UAV was incredibly fast, but winds pushed it so that it flew over one corner of the building, disqualifying that run.

In the end, though, the DIY Drones team scored a stunning success with their final try, with Chris Anderson's UAV completing the course in 36 seconds to win the tile!

The competition is over! Diy drones is 1st, with deathpod3000 taking the Engineers Choice award. Thanks for following!!! See you next year!

Jordi launches the UAV:
This robot used sparklers to avoid collisions with pedestrians:
All set on the starting line:

More:

• Sparkfun's coverage
• Sparkfun's twitter feed, with reports and pictures.
• Competition page
• Chris Anderson's DIY Drones Blog

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Okay, here's the deal. We've a huge amount of new inventory arriving at the backdoor to our warehouse in anticipation of Maker Faire. The problem is, we share a warehouse with the rest of O'Reilly and we need to clear out space to make room for the new stuff.

So...we've sharpened our pencils and for the next two weeks, we are rolling back the prices on over a hundred of our existing products. Most around 50% off, but some of them discounted as much as 75% off! Once they're gone they're gone. This is a limited time spring-cleaning sale from now through midnight April 30th (midnight on our San Francisco clocks).

Use code BLOWOUT at checkout for the FREE shipping on orders over $100.

Check out all the products that are on sale now!

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Minneapolis maker Frank E. Yost shared this beauty of a project with us back in MAKE Volume 11, and it was a definite favorite in the MAKE Labs from the get-go. I mean, who doesn't love sheet metal and pop rivets?

Frank loves R/C toys but doesn't love plastic. He was on the quest for a metal toy racer 10 inches or longer to make into an R/C car, but the best ones he found were all collectibles. In true maker spirit, he decided to build a custom metal body and based his design on tether cars of the 1930s.

This illustration (by the talented Nik Shultz) shows a closer look at the suspension and body from below:

The project is not only sweet because you end up with a beautiful custom Retro R/C Racer, but you even get a built-in mini primer on sheet metal modeling. Check out a bigger view of the illo above and a peek at the whole project in our Digital Edition. Make sure to pick up your copy of MAKE Volume 11 from the Maker Shed if you don't have one already. Volume 11 also includes a special "DIY Wheels" section, with plans for making a mobile drive-in movie theater, a cool chopper out of an old bicycle, and a pedal powered iPod charger, as well as how to make a remote control bird feeder to take amazing photos of birds and a vacuum-former that lets you create molded 3D parts out of plastic.

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In a study that should surprise just about none of you (unless you're one of those newspaper execs who still thinks people will pay for the news), it turns out that teens have absolutely no interest in paying for news (thanks Felix Pleşoianu!), and they really like aggregation sites that provide them with a lot of info quickly and efficiently. Could newspapers (or the AP) provide them with this type of service? Sure... but they chose not to, and now complain about the companies that recognized this and provided what they refused to.

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An anonymous reader writes "University researchers in the UK have put together a team tasked with predicting the next big thing in terms of communication technologies, in a bid to tackle ethical pitfalls before they become a problem. This is in the wake of the rise of social networking websites such as Facebook, Twitter and MySpace, which has led to a dramatic increase in the amount of personal information available online."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The fabulous Kasey McMahon of yourpsychogirlfriend.com, whose Compubeaver and Text-o-Possum we featured in early Boing Boing TV episodes, has sent along this amazing photograph of a newly completed work: a fully functional birdcage dress. By "fully functional," I mean that it has birdies in it. There's an Instructables for it, too! Roll your own.

(thanks, Christy Canida and Kasey McMahon)

Annathered has a wonderful, step-by-step HOWTO for creating delicious cream puffs in the shape of Totoro. The photoset is here, and the recipe and assembly instructions are here. (Thanks, Souris!)

Below, the trailer for the '80s Miyazaki anime classic on which the aforementioned dessert is based.

Here it is. And, wouldn't you know it, they have an opinion on the murder conviction delivered to Phil Spector, whom they reveal as one of their own.

[L]et us say this to you now, American dogs: your snipers may take us out with headshots, or your lawyers may frame us for murder. We care not about the methods, and we care less about the results. Because we are not all as easy to find as our fallen comrade who lived in a castle in Los Angeles. Most of our castles are in Somalia, and they are underground, and they are guarded by wild boars who haven't been fed this week.

Official Statement on the Phil Spector verdict (somalipirate.livejournal.com, thanks Sean Bonner)

Back in February, we found it disturbing that Finland was allowing the results of an election to stand, despite the fact that at least 2% of the votes had gone missing due to e-voting glitches. However, it looks like some sense of sanity has been restored as a higher court has now rejected the election results and ordered a new election. One hopes that the new election won't involve similarly screwed up e-voting machines. Speaking of which... in a separate article, we find yet another story of e-voting machines that were "mis-calibrated" in such a way that made it difficult to impossible for people to vote for candidates of their choice. At some point, given all of these problems with e-voting machines, you have to ask why elections officials still rely on them.

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

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In this installment of Lost Knowledge, we look at the arcane arts of homebrewing your own electronic components. This column was inspired by Collin's experiments with light-emitting diodes in his Make presents the LED video (see below). I thought it might be fun to collect some of the other homebrew component projects we've covered here on MAKE and that I could find elsewhere.

This is far from comprehensive. If you know of other cool projects of this nature, please add links in the Comments.

Diodes:

Collin's experiments with light-emitting properties in silicon carbide for his LED episode of Make presents.

Science and tech enthusiast Nyle Steiner's page detailing his experiments in building a negative resistance oscillator using a homemade tunnel diode.

Another diode experiment from Nyle Steiner, a homemade vacuum tube diode.

This is a follow up experiment from the report that I wrote previously about home evacuation of a vacuum tube. The next step is to make my own vacuum tube from scratch. This is my first attempt, a diode. The diode seems to work surprisingly well and makes the thought of putting a grid between the filament and the plate very encouraging.

 

Triodes

The undisputed king of homebrewed retro componentry is France's Claude Paillard and his made-from-scratch triodes. This guy is like some Franco-geek national treasure. His site is in French, but there's a link to Google Translation (for what that's worth). We've posted this video several times already, but it's worth posting again for anyone who missed it.

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Al writes "Two research groups have found a way to unzip carbon nanotubes to create nanoribbons of graphene — a material that has shown great promise for use as nanoscale transistors but which have proven difficult to manufacture previously. A team led by James Tour, a professor of chemistry and computer science at Rice University and another led by Hongjie Dai, a professor of chemistry at Stanford University, both figured out ways to slice carbon nanotubes open to create the nanoribbens. The Stanford team was funded by Intel and the Rice group is in talks with several companies about commercializing their approach."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.