jhfry writes "An interesting development by an unexpected source, Phoenix Technologies is releasing a Linux based, virtualization enabled, BIOS based OS for computers. They implemented a full Linux distro right on the BIOS chips, and using integrated virtualization technology it 'allows PCs and laptops to hot-switch between the main operating system, such as Windows, and the HyperSpace environment.' So essentially they are 'trying to create a new market using the ideas of a fast-booting, safe platform that people can work in, but remain outside of Windows.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

My 3-year-old son and I love watching the YouTube clip of 6-year-old guitarist Quinn Sullivan playing "Twist & Shout" on the Ellen DeGeneres show. Joel just pointed me to the above Ellen clip from this week featuring 9-year-old Yuto Miyazawa tearing up Ozzy's Crazy Train.

Yesterday, Craigslist caved in to the demands of various state Attorneys General, and agreed to pre-moderate all of the "adult" ads that go on their site. This appeared to be exactly what many grandstanding AGs had been asking for... but it appears that more than a few of them were upset that Craigslist did this without granting the AGs a chance to take credit for it. First, we had NY AG Andrew Cuomo's petulent statement about how Craigslist never should have done this without first getting approval from Andrew Cuomo, and now the EFF points out a similar complaint from South Carolina AG Henry McMaster, who says that he's going to continue his plan to throw Craigslist management in jail unless they remove all sexually explicit material from the site.

It's difficult to know where to start on this, but McMaster's understanding of the law doesn't seem to have anything to do with the actual law. First off, plenty of sexually explicit material is not illegal. Second, even if the material is somehow illegal, the liability is on those who posted it, not Craigslist.

Oh yeah. It's probably worth noting that a similarity between both Cuomo and McMaster? Both are apparently (definitely in McMaster's case) seeking their respective state's governorship... You would think that abusing a high-level gov't position for grandstanding and censorship would disqualify one from getting to run a state, but apparently not.

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adamengst writes "A US Government Accountability Office report raises concerns about the Air Force's ability to modernize and maintain the constellation of satellites necessary to provide GPS services to military and civilian users. TidBITS looks at the situation and possible solutions."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I had set aside today to explore Tumblr's API.

Apparently it was the wrong day because I keep getting HTML in response to my write calls that says: "We're making some changes to our infrastructure and certain pages may be unavailable for a few minutes." This has been going on for many hours! Not gooood.

I looked all over the place to see if there were any notes about this, but haven't found anything. So as a last resort I'm asking here if anyone knows anything about this.

Does anyone know anything about this?

This week, Friday, May 15, 12-noon PDT/3pm EDT, we'll be joined by Ken Gracey and Jeff Ledger of Parallax. They'll be talking to us about the latest products and happenings at Parallax, especially the upcoming all-night Unofficial Propeller Expo, on June 27-28, 2009. See my earlier post for details about the Expo.

As always, we'll also be taking calls from listeners and talking about MAKE, the upcoming Maker Faire, and news from the world of DIY. We'll also be taking your calls live. The number is (646) 915-8698. Call for cool prizes!

Make: Talk on BlogTalkRadio

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imamac writes "It seems Apple is seeking to beef up security by hiring Ivan Krstic, the one-time director of security architecture at One Laptop per Child. 'Krstic, a well-respected innovator who designed the Bitfrost security specification for the OLPC initiative, joined Cupertino this week and will work on core OS security. His hiring comes at a crucial time for a company that ties security to its marketing campaigns despite public knowledge that it's rather trivial to launch exploits against the Mac.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A new study on file sharing has been released by the PRS, the British music licensing body -- you know, the one whose "investigators" are actually sales people -- and its conclusions are a little bizarre, to say the least. In general, the conclusion seems to be that the Long Tail theory doesn't hold, because the most popular music on file-sharing networks is also the most popular music in the charts. Maybe we've been misunderstanding this Long Tail thing all along, but a big part of it is acknowledging the hits. You don't ignore them, rather you also pay attention to the long tail of less popular items. It makes sense that the file-sharing download charts parallel music sales charts, since they're largely tracking the same market; this also reinforces the point that the music industry's claims about the impact of piracy on sales are overblown (after all, if so many people are downloading certain tracks, one wouldn't expect them to sell so well).

The study also says the Long Tail fails because "there is too much choice on file-sharing sites" and it's difficult for people to find new music. Again, this reinforces, rather than undermines the Long Tail, which requires a strong recommendation system to succeed. But the file-sharing services themselves aren't recommendation systems, nor are they intended to be. The recommendation systems are blogs, net radio, word of mouth, and other sources; the file-sharing networks are just the distribution network. It sounds like this study actually does more to assert the validity of the Long Tail than refute it, and it also does very little to help make the case that file-sharing is destroying the music business. But that, of course, wouldn't be the message the PRS wants to deliver -- so it sets up the straw man that if the Long Tail is wrong, then file sharing must be bad. Only problem is it doesn't even do that well.

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

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The XGS AVR 8-Bit is the ultimate fusion of art and science. Developed to be a very competitive entry/midrange development kit for the Atmel MEGA AVR 644 processor with 64K FLASH, 4K SRAM, and running at 28+ MIPs. The kit was designed with the philosophy that you don't want to waste time trying to figure things out. This kit takes you step by step, saving you time, so you can learn quickly and have fun doing it!

More about the XGS AVR 8-Bit Development System

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peterwayner writes "Six of the top ten links on a Google search for one of my books points to a pirate site when I type in 'wayner data compression textbook.' Others search strings actually locate pages that are selling legit copies including digital editions for the Kindle. I've started looking around for suggestions. Any thoughts from the Slashdot crowd? The free copies aren't boosting sales for my books. Do I (1) get another job, (2) sue people, or (3) invent some magic spell? Is society going to be able to support people who synthesize knowledge or will we need to rely on the Wikipedia for everything? I'm open to suggestions."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Yesterday, at the excellent Tech Policy Summit, I got to interview Stanford professor and IP expert Mark Lemley on stage. Lemley has a new book out, The Patent Crisis and How the Courts Can Solve It. It's a good read -- and I recommend it to everyone interested in what's happening with patents. I don't agree with everything Lemley says in the book, but I think it is a much more thoughtful view than you hear coming from the two big industries fighting over patent reform. Patent reform has been (unfairly) set up as the tech industry vs. the pharma industry, and that totally misses the real problems with the system. Lemley believes that the problems can be fixed via the court system... whereas I'm not convinced, but I do think that the current patent reform proposals miss the mark by a wide margin.

The interview was quite interesting, and while most of it reviewed some of the big discussion points (what's the "problem," where is the reform plan heading, does it make sense to carve out exceptions -- such as for software patents) my final question to him was about the lawsuit we wrote about yesterday concerning the patentability of genes.

Lemley did a great job outlining the issues brought forth in the case, but concluded by highlighting what I believe is the big problem with letting the courts sort things out. He noted that while there had been legal battles over patented genes before, they had always been between two biotech firms, neither of which wanted to challenge the very idea of gene patents. So, instead, the very concept of patenting genes has been left untested in the courts for twenty-five years. What's the result? Well, an entire industry built up around it. If we suddenly say that genes are unpatentable, that will wreak havoc in that industry. Now, that may be a good thing, but it highlights the problem of leaving the question to the courts. Since no one challenged this for so long, the disruption could have quite an impact.

Earlier in the interview, Lemley quoted one of my favorite quotes about the patent system, by economist Fritz Machlup, who noted that, if we had to do it all over again, there appears to be no reason to actually create a patent system, but since we already have one, it doesn't make sense to get rid of it. But that's a big part of the problem. Now that we already have "patented genes" and an entire industry built up over 25 years around it, some will undoubtedly argue that it doesn't make sense to get rid of gene patents because of all the problems that would cause. And thus, we're left with a situation that has been highlighted in Petra Moser's research: the patent system, by default, distorts the market by creating certain industries built up around those patents, and makes it very difficult for more complete market forces to take effect.

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Gary Pendergast writes "Monty Widenius, the 'father' of MySQL, has created the the Open Database Alliance, with the aim of becoming the industry hub for the MySQL open source database. He wants to unify all MySQL-related development and services, providing a potential solution to the fragmentation and uncertainty facing the communities, businesses and technical experts involved with MySQL, following the news of the Oracle acquisition of Sun." Related to this, an anonymous reader writes that "MySQL has announced a project to refactor MySQL to be a more Drizzle-like database." Update: 05/14 20:50 GMT by T : Original headline implied that this was a project of Sun, but (thanks to the open source nature of MySQL) it's actually Monty Widenius — no longer with Sun — leading this effort.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Raph Koster makes a pretty good case for 1971 being the perfect year to be born geek. I'm biased (born: July 17, 1971), of course:

* It meant I got to see Star Wars in the theater, 13 times, at age 8 and 9, exactly when it would overwhelm my sense of wonder.

* I got an 8-bit computer at exactly the age when boys get obsessive about details, and I spent days PEEKing and POKEing and typing in listings from magazines and learning how computers actually worked.

* It meant at least half the new games I played were actually new ideas.

* And yet I got to play real pinball machines.

* In real arcades.

* New Wave science fiction was the used paperbacks laying around, and I got to read cyberpunk and steampunk as they were invented, and see SF when fandom was not yet a media circus.

* I got to play D&D from as close to the beginning as most anyone.

The perfect geek age?

Here's Charlie Stross's stirring address on the future of video games, a world in which everyone ends up being a gamer:

If this sounds like a tall order, and if you're wondering why you might want to go for the sixty-something hardcore gamer demographic, just remember: you're aiming to grab the share of the empty-nester recreational budget that currently goes in the direction of Winnebago and friends. Once gas regularly starts to hit ten bucks a gallon (which it did last year where I come from) they'll be looking to do different things with their retirement -- the games industry is perfectly positioned to clean up.

And then there are the younger generation. Let's take a look at generation Z:

The folks who are turning 28 in 2030 were born in 2002. 9/11 happened before they were born. The first President of the United States they remember is Barack Obama. The space shuttle stopped flying when they were eight. Mobile phones, wifi, broadband internet, and computers with gigabytes of memory have been around forever. They have probably never seen a VHS video recorder or an LP record player (unless they hang out in museums). Oh, and they're looking forward to seeing the first man on the moon. (It's deja vu, all over again.)

LOGIN 2009 keynote: gaming in the world of 2030

Here's some great self-promo advice for writers in the 21st century from Jeff Vandermeer, excerpted from his forthcoming book Booklife: Strategies and Survival Tips for 21st-Century Writers:

A writer usually has little direct effect on marketing or sales, but can have a huge impact on publicity. To be most effective, you must:

- Understand your audience and the commercial or noncommercial appeal of your creative project. Selling a thousand copies of a nonfiction collection might be an excellent result, while selling a thousand copies of a mystery novel might be seen as a huge failure.

- Understand the relationship between PR efforts and sales, PR and your reputation. The simple fact is, your PR efforts can greatly enhance your reputation without having as large an effect on your sales. Good PR is as much about setting you up for future opportunities and making sure you stay in the public eye as it is about readers making purchases. Studies show that readers may need to hear or read about a book as many as seven times before deciding to purchase it. Thus, a strong PR effort will influence sales over time, but the primary impact is to position you in other ways.

- Make sure to fit the scale of the PR to the scale of the project. You don't send copies of your saddle-stapled 42-page chapbook on armadillo farming to Publishers Weekly. Nor do you send a techno-thriller to the book reviewer at Armadillo Farming Quarterly. (Except, of course, in the remote eventuality that armadillos play an integral role in the plot.)

Booklife: Strategies and Survival Tips for 21st-Century Writers (via Futurismic!)

Meara O'Reilly, who works on magazine projects in MAKE Labs, is also a talented sound and visual artist. She's just completed a short video, with her friend Lisa Foti-Straus, of the Chladni music she's been working on. She built her Chladni (CLOD-knee) plate after working on the Chladni article in MAKE, Volume 16. She's been composing songs based on the images that emerge as she sings into it. I love the tones she gets with her voice. Very haunting.

Chladni Song

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Dean from the Participatory Culture Foundation sez,

In less than five weeks, the first ever Open Video Conference is happening in New York City (June 19-20). It will address issues surrounding free speech, innovation, and the future of cultural engagement in video.

What's up: Internet video is approaching a major crossroads. The terms of cultural engagement and free expression are being set: will we have a permissive media ecosystem that allows widespread participation, or will we continue in a tradition of consolidated media empires? A number of legal, technological, and business challenges could keep the medium from reaching its full potential. Open Video is the movement towards a more open, democratic, and decentralized video environment, one that highly values innovation and free speech.

Speakers include: BB's Xeni Jardin, NYU's Clay Shirky, DVD Jon, Lizz Winstead the co-creator of the Daily Show, EFF attourney Corynne McSherry, and lots more! Also participating are hackers from free and open source software projects, including: Firefox, VLC, GStreamer, Xiph/Ogg/Theora, Miro, Boxee, Cinelerra and many more. See the full lineup here.

Registration is filling up fast, so make sure you sign up soon!

Open Video Conference (Thanks, Dean!)

(Disclosure: I am proud to serve as a volunteer member of the Board of Directors for the nonprofit, charitable Participatory Culture Foundation, the hosts of this conference)

Ben sends us these Geekbooks, "Neat little pocket notebooks made from vintage computer note cards."

Geek Books (Thanks, Ben!)

Last month, when the work print of the movie Wolverine leaked online, the studio 20th Century Fox went ballistic, sending out all sorts of threats and getting the FBI involved. We had suggested that if they had taken a different approach, they could have turned the leak into something beneficial. Our suggestion was to make the following statement:

Hey Wolverine fans! We know that you're all looking forward to the release of the movie next month. We're excited too! By now you may have heard that an early totally unfinished version has been leaked online. It's missing a whole bunch of stuff -- including some amazing special effects -- and honestly, this version isn't a finished product at all. We think you'll get a much better overall experience by waiting for the full finished product, but we certainly understand that some of you just can't wait (trust us, we feel the same way!). If that's the case, please, feel free to check it out, but please remember that this isn't even close to the final version. If anything, think of this as a "behind-the-scenes" peek of just what a movie looks like before all the real "movie magic" gets put in there. If you do check it out, we hope you'll join us May 1st to check out the finalized version as well on the big screen the way we intended for you to see this awesome movie. It's just a month away!

And, of course, we had people from the movie industry tell us we were crazy (some funny emails from the movie studios, actually), and that such a plan would never work, and how could they not call in the FBI and threaten legal action. Apparently, my suggestion was the dumbest thing ever.

And... yet... when others actually do something like that, it appears to be working. Reader mikez points us to the news that the band Wilco discovered that its upcoming album has been leaked online, so they put up their own streaming version of the album for all to listen to and released the following statement:

"Well we made it nearly a month with copies of Wilco the album floating around out there before it leaked. Pretty impressive restraint in this day and age. But the inevitable happened last night. Since we know you're curious and probably have better things to do than scour the internet for a download though we do understand the attraction of the illicit we ve posted a stream of the full album...Feel free to refer to it as wilco the stream if you must."

See? Turns out it's not so difficult. And, while 20th Century Fox was getting slammed left and right for its actions, Twitter this morning is abuzz with people talking about how awesome the new Wilco album is and how excited they are that it's coming out.

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Death Metal writes with an excerpt from the website of defense attorney Evan Levow: "After two years of attempting to get the computer based source code for the Alcotest 7110 MKIII-C, defense counsel in State v. Chun were successful in obtaining the code, and had it analyzed by Base One Technologies, Inc. By making itself a party to the litigation after the oral arguments in April, Draeger subjected itself to the Supreme Court's directive that Draeger ultimately provide the source code to the defendants' software analysis house, Base One. ... Draeger reviewed the code, as well, through its software house, SysTest Labs, which agreed with Base One, that the patchwork code that makes up the 7110 is not written well, nor is it written to any defined coding standard. SysTest said, 'The Alcotest NJ3.11 source code appears to have evolved over numerous transitions and versioning, which is responsible for cyclomatic complexity.'" Bruce Schneier comments on the same report and neatly summarizes the take-away lesson: "'You can't look at our code because we don't want you to' simply isn't good enough."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

We're thrilled to introduce our new line of Boing Boing merchandise, designed by Boing Boing and made by our pals at GAMA-GO! Our plan is to create a small collection of wonderful products, from t-shirts to limited edition artwork, shiny gee-gaws to curious knicknaks. Folks from the happy mutants universe will do the designing and GAMA-GO is handling production, fulfillment, and customer service. We're also benefiting from GAMA-GO's helpful design suggestions, gentle nudges, and years of experience, to finetune our curious concepts. They're our co-conspirators in bringing Boing Boing's product pipe dreams into the physical world.

We're starting modestly, with a selection of three simple t-shirt designs:

• Jackhammer Jitters: See our Jackhammer Jill mascot as she sees you, vectorized, highly-caffeinated, and resonating with the high weirdness of the world. Mark and I came up with this art during a conference where we probably should have been paying attention to other things. But isn't that what Boing Boing is all about?

• Logorhythmic: This is the only shirt of the three that incorporates the familiar Boing Boing logo in the design. Joel said, if we're going to make a logo tee, why not go all the way?

• Get Illuminated! 20th Anniversary Edition: In 1989, the first pages of the bOING bOING print 'zine spewed forth from a copy machine. To celebrate our 20th anniversary, we've reissued the original bOING bOING t-shirt, featuring Mark's 1990 illustration of Kata Sutra, the cybervixen who whispered in our ear until Jackhammer Jill made the scene. Like the original t-shirt graphic, this one glows in the dark!

The t-shirts are available in men's and women's sizes for $24/each. If you buy two shirts, or just spend more than $25 at GAMA-GO on any of their fine products, domestic shipping is absolutely free. We hope you dig the new Boing Boing line, designed by us, made by GAMA-GO. We'll bug you from time to time with info about new products, reminders, and other details. Thank you for your support!

Boing Boing t-shirts from GAMA-GO

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" was also the theme of MAKE, Volume 17

---

This week's Lost Knowledge column is something of a link dump of resources I've collected in my research on Lost Knowledge, for MAKE Volume 17, and for this column. I want to grow it with additional resources, so if you know of decent repositories of information related to these subjects, please post them in the comments.

The New York Public Library maintains an online gallery of 700 years worth of scientific drawings. They can be viewed here. [via Brass Goggles]

John Jenkins is a private collector of radios and antique scientific apparatus who's been collecting for some 35 years. His amazing collection, called the SparkMuseum, is available for viewing online. Absolutely incredible stuff here, from the dawn of electrical experimentation up to the vacuum tube.

You'll need a robot translator to tell you what you're looking at, but there are all sorts of cool steam-powered machinery on display. Lots of steampunky inspiration to be had at Stoommachine!

Early Technology is a Scottish firm that provides antique technology to collectors, museums, film sets, and others. From miner's lanterns to adding machines.

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This question came up in a conference call earlier today and I thought it would be useful to open it up publicly.

Here's how to decide:

1. Someone who has made largely selfless contributions to open technology -- i.e. tech that people can reuse without limits or fees. Examples would be BitTorrent or HTTP.

2. Someone who you think would "do the right thing" whatever that is, most of the time. That is, someone you trust.

3. Other criteria?

Caveat: No one is perfect. You're not saying your hero is a saint. Their contribution could have been amends for past mistakes. It should be someone who has made a major contribution without asking for much in return.

At the Tech Policy Summit yesterday, David Carson, the General Counsel of the US Copyright Office spent a bit of time at the beginning of his talk explaining why the Performance Rights Act made sense. This is the bill that would make radio stations pay musicians (rather than just songwriters as it is now) for every song they play on the radio. The recording industry insists that it's somehow unfair that radio stations have been promoting their music for free, and Carson seems to believe their explanation 100% (which is, unfortunately, quite typical of the Copyright Office). He argued, unconvincingly, that while radio used to promote artists (the reason that stations don't need to pay musicians), it no longer does so. That makes no sense. While there are alternatives out there for promoting artists, and radio may not have the impact it once had, that hardly means that the stations aren't promoting the music.

And, of course, the most damning argument against the recording industry's demand for money here is the fact that, for decades, the industry has (illegally) had the money go in the other direction. The system of payola has shown, quite clearly, how much the recording industry values airtime, in that it's willing to pay radio stations to play its music.

So, can anyone explain why it's illegal for record labels to pay radio stations to play music, but it's okay for Congress to force radio stations to pay the record labels for playing their music? It defies common sense.

Yet, with a nice push from the Copyright Office, the bill is moving forward, and will face a full House vote. During the Committee debate over the bill, Rep. Daniel Lungren made a perfectly reasonable suggestion: why not wait until the GAO had a chance to do an economic analysis of how the bill would impact radio stations. Considering that the bill is effectively a tax on those radio stations, this seems like a perfectly reasonable idea... but it resulted in Rep. Howard Berman (who represents Hollywood, always) accusing Lungren of trying to kill the bill. Isn't it great when simply waiting to find out what kind of impact the bill might have gets you accused of trying to kill it. Apparently in Congress, it's all about shooting first and asking questions later.

That said, Peter Kafka, over at AllThingsD, has made the best point: most people don't care about this bill because they don't realize that it's really a bill to bail out the RIAA by creating a radio station tax that goes straight into the recording industry's bank accounts. So, rather than call it the Performance Rights Act, it should more accurately be called the Britney Bailout Bill.

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If you live in Madrid or Barcelona, you might not notice the air pollution due to your contact buzz according to a new study. The Superior Council of Scientific Investigations found the air in those cities to be laced with at least five drugs: amphetamines, opiates, cannabinoids, lysergic acid and most prominently cocaine. Researchers found cocaine in concentrations between 29 and 850 picogram per cubic meter of air. The group stresses that the air samples were taken in high drug areas and don't represent most of the air in the cities.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

mbone writes "Earlier today there was a confirmed Google outage which got a lot of attention from network operators. From a post to NANOG after everything calmed down: 'Google ack'da maintenance on their core network did not go as planned-Forced traffic to one peer link that was unable to handle all the traffic. Maintenance has been rolled back. Issue has been restored.' This is exactly what makes me nervous about cloud computing and data storage. It's bad enough when I screw up a config and it takes down my mail, but what about when it happens to the entire globe at once?" Several readers also point to CNET's coverage of the outage.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Douglas Rushkoff is a guest blogger.

This is what I love about the Internet. Two days after we posted Janine Saunders' Life Inc: The Movie, Carlos Boyle - author of De Revolutionibus Orbium Argentum - has created a subtitled version on his website for the Spanish speaking (and reading) audience.

Reflexiones Siesteras - Life Inc subtitulada en español

The Homegrown Village is going to be at Maker Faire. Of their site, they say:

This web site celebrates all of us who pioneer a HOMEGROWN way to live, eat, grow, and express ourselves. We connect to the land and to each other.

HOMEGROWN.org is a place where we can learn from each other, share our questions, and show off how we dig in the dirt, grow our own food, work with our hands, and cook and share our meals - all things that we call HOMEGROWN.

On their site, they're going to be featuring some of the "villagers" coming to the Faire. Here's what they have to say about the Greywater Guerrillas:

The Greywater Guerrillas are a longstanding and legendary collaborative of educators, designers, builders, and artists who educate people on sustainable water culture and infrastructure. The group will be on hand each day teaching people how to integrate a greywater irrigation system into their gardens, as well as building a composting toilet for your home.

See more coverage of HOMEGROWN villagers on their blog.

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eldavojohn writes "GamePolitics is writing about a proposal to tax on things that make your kids fat. The logic from its author: 'Almost all experts agree that the primary reasons [for the obesity epidemic] are increased consumption of larger quantities of high calorie foods, snacks and sugar sweetened beverages... and lack of physical activity as vigorous play is replaced by sedentary activities such as watching more television, movies and videos and playing video games. This bill would raise revenues from modest surcharges on the very food products and sedentary activities that are linked to the lifestyle changes involved in the explosion of childhood obesity in the last 20-30 years.' Not as explicit as Japan's fat tax but we're getting there."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Over at the newly redesigned BB Gadgets, dig the gorgeous gallery of "Ten Beautiful Computers." Seen above, the legendary Cray 2 and Jeffrey Stephenson's Ingraham. "Ten Beautiful Computers"

Two years ago, we were among those who piled on in response to author Mark Helprin's NY Times op-ed piece in which he argued that copyright should last forever. We explained why this showed a fundamental ignorance of the very purpose of copyright law. Of course, rather than inform himself, it appears Helprin spent the past two years fuming against those who tried to educate him. He's written an entire book bashing the "digital barbarians" who are trying to destroy society by picking away at copyright. I'm about halfway through the book, and I'd finish it faster if I didn't have to keep whacking my head against the wall wondering how someone could fail so spectacularly at basic fundamental logic and comprehension. I'm planning to write up something of a review (along with reviews of some other, much more worthwhile books) at some point soon.

In the meantime, however, the Wall Street Journal saw fit to give Helprin space to embarrass himself royally earlier this week. The piece attacks consumer rights advocates as being advocates for "thieves" (don't get me started...) and implies that those fighting against copyright extension are all part of a plot of some big tech companies to get all information for free (and destroy society at the same time). It goes on to suggest (despite the fact that copyright law has been changed in one direction and one direction only over the years) that those of us concerned about the massive expansion of copyright have been winning battle after battle with almost no opposition:

So here we have a city -- the hypothetical city and New York itself -- deeply dependent upon what copyright protects but unaware of the threat it faces, even as, sector by sector, it begins to fall. Are you -- were you -- in publishing? Are you, or were you, a journalist? A screenwriter, composer, architect, designer, photographer, writer, or in a business that brings the work of these people to the public? What have you done to protect your life's blood and to guarantee the continued independence of your voice? As distressed as you may be now or not long from now, should copyright go the way of all flesh, some of you may soon be unable even to recognize your own profession, if indeed it continues to exist.

As ridiculous as his book is, at least his argument there is laid out with a bit more effort. This piece is just pure tripe, backed up with nothing even resembling fact. It's odd that a publication like the Wall Street Journal would allow blatant falsehoods to be published in its pages, but if that's what it takes these days to defend copyright... I guess it shows how desperate the defenders of Big Copyright have become.

K Matthew Dames from Copycense has taken an initial stab at correcting many of Helprin's errors in great detail, citing numerous sources to show just how incredibly wrong Helprin is over and over again.

Still, the thing that struck me is that Helprin's argument does what many other "defenses" of the elitist (and purely imaginary) notion that there's some war between "professional content creators" and those weak-minded "amateurs" who are trying to destroy them seem to do: it disproves its own point. For all the talk about how copyright and other tools of "protection" against the riff raff guarantees higher quality output, all we get is totally indefensible material like Helprin's. The defense of copyright produces misleading, poorly thought out, poorly defended and flat out wrong content such as Helprin's. Meanwhile, the thoughtful, reasonable, useful analysis comes from sites like Copycense. In the end, that may be the best response to Helprin's work. His own words disprove his own thesis.

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Craig writes "Gamepark have officiallly released the follow up to its successful Linux handheld the GP2X, the GP2X Wiz is a 533Mhz Linux based handheld thats a similiar size to the GBA Micro with a touchscreen and 12 games preloaded into memory many of which are demos of commercial games, the system comes with 1gb of flash memory which can be expanded with sd cards. The Homebrew Community have already released ports of games such as Quake, Wolfenstein3d, Warcraft and emulators for Snes, Genesis, Commodore64 and the arcade emulator Mame."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Back when the entertainment industry first got serious about pushing its silly three strikes concept, we were among those who wondered if the entertainment industry would accept a reverse three strikes rule, meaning that if they send three bogus accusations, they lose their own internet access.

However, leave it to Ed Felten to demonstrate just how ridiculous any sort of three strikes policy is -- especially one based on accusations, rather than convictions -- by suggesting that we extend a three strikes rule to print as well, noting that the reasoning behind the internet three strikes rules seem to also apply to print:

My proposed system is simplicity itself. The government sets up a registry of accused infringers. Anybody can send a complaint to the registry, asserting that someone is infringing their copyright in the print medium. If the government registry receives three complaints about a person, that person is banned for a year from using print.

As in the Internet case, the ban applies to both reading and writing, and to all uses of print, including informal ones. In short, a banned person may not write or read anything for a year.

A few naysayers may argue that print bans might be hard to enforce, and that banning communication based on mere accusations of wrongdoing raises some minor issues of due process and free speech. But if those issues don't trouble us in the Internet setting, why should they trouble us here?

Yes, if banned from using print, some students will be unable to do their school work, some adults will face minor inconvenience in their daily lives, and a few troublemakers will not be allowed to participate in -- or even listen to -- political debate. Maybe they'll think more carefully the next time, before allowing themselves to be accused of copyright infringement.

In short, a three-strikes system is just as good an idea for print as it is for the Internet. Which country will be the first to adopt it?

It seems like anyone who thinks three strikes rules are a smart idea should be required to (a) read this and (b) explain why it shouldn't apply to print.

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Just Posted: Our Compact 'Superzoom' Group Test. We continue our series of group tests with six cameras that all combine a compact 'take-anywhere' body with the versatility of a 10x or 12x zoom lens. Throw in some extras such as HD video, super wide-angle lenses and image stabilization and you've got yourself a very tempting recipe. But which one is the most tasty dish? Find out in our review.

rgarbacz writes "Today at 13:12 GMT ESA launched successfully new and long awaiting spacecrafts: Herschel — the 3.5m mirror infrared telescope, and Planck — the CMB mapper. The spacecrafts were carried by the Arian 5, which lifted off from Kourou in French Guiana. They will stay in L2 to perform the research. Herschel and Planck are one of the most expensive and important missions of the European Space Agency. They were built to perform measurements with an outstanding quality. Planck will measure CMB with accuracy below 1%, over 10 times better than the previous mission WMAP. Because of this high sensitivity both spacecrafts are cooled to temperatures close to absolute zero by on board liquid helium, and staying in L2 is very helpful to maintain this state. Both spacecrafts are designed to observe the Universe at its infancy, the Herschel — the first stars (those real ones), and galaxies (whichever came first), the Planck the first photons which were set free, the so called cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB)."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Instructables is having another "Get the LED Out" contest, this time sponsored by Monkeylectric:

LEDs are some of the best things ever. They provide colorful light, barely use any power, and are easy to learn how to use. We love them and would love to see what cool projects you can make using them. So we teamed up with the mad LED scientists a Monkeylectric to bring you a new contest: Get the LED Out in '09!

The rules are simple. To enter, the Instructable must involve LEDs. That's it. It can be a part of a much bigger project or it can be focused on a cool use of LEDs. Just be sure to document it well with clear photos and text and show us what you can do!

The grand prize winner will receive a set of four Monkey Lights from Monkeylectric. With those installed, any bike will instantly become a beautiful light show at night! Six first prize winners will win one Monkey Light which provides a lot of light to ride safer in style.

Contest deadline is June 14.

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demishade writes "Peacekeeper, the browser benchmark from the makers of 3DMark comes out of beta and shows an interesting (though perhaps not surprising) tidbit — the more popular a browser, the worse its performance. While it should not be surprising to anyone that IE slugs at the last place, the gap between Firefox and Chrome, is. Once IE's market share goes the way of the Dodo will web developers start cursing Firefox? How long until Google comes out with a JavaScript intensive application that will practically require Chrome to function?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Chris was the first of a few of you to send in the news of a proposed law in Maine that would outlaw the ability of any company to let RVs park overnight for free. The battle basically pits campgrounds, which charge fees, against Wal-Mart, which has always allowed RVs to park in their parking lots for free, recognizing that many who stay overnight in their parking lots will likely pick up supplies at Wal-Mart as well. There doesn't seem to be any actual rationale for the "no free overnight parking" law, other than that the campgrounds are upset that they're losing business. The whole thing seems rather silly, though. A Wal-Mart parking lot is hardly a scenic location. Are these campgrounds offering so little that they can't compete against a giant empty concrete parking lot? Of course, if this law does pass, the end result is pretty predictable. Rather than driving more RVs to campsites, RV owners may just start avoiding Maine altogether.

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Just a reminder that the last day to buy advance (discounted) tickets for Maker Faire is May 20th. Tickets can be purchased online and at locations around the Bay Area. Tickets purchased after the advance deadline will be at regular price, same as at the gate.

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PL/SQL Guy writes "The Kindle has a number of "remote kill" flags built in to the hardware that, among other things, allow the text-to-speech function to be disabled at any time on a book-by-book basis. 'Beginning yesterday, Random House Publishers began to disable text-to-speech remotely. The TTS function has apparently been remotely disabled in over 40 works so far.' But what no one at Amazon will discuss is what other flags are lurking in the Kindle format: is there a "read only once" flag? A "no turning the pages backwards" flag?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Record iPhone audio directly to the cloud with the intuitive Audioboo app and have it automatically update facebook, twitter, and iTunes for effortless podcasting fun.

AudioBoo Makes Podcasting With iPhone Dead Simple [via Mashable]

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Sigma UK has announced the price and availability of the DP2 digital compact camera. Announced at the Photokina 2008 exhibition, this 14MP camera (4.7 million pixel images with three pieces of color data recorded at each location) with a large FOVEON X3 sensor has started shipping in the UK at a suggested retail price of £599.99. The optional VF-21 Viewfinder and HA-21 Hood adapter are available for £114.99 and £19.99 respectively.

LegionKK writes ""Ultimately, deciding whether you should take an online quiz comes down to a question of trust: Are you comfortable putting your information — personal or financial — into the owner's hands? Remember, even if you don't directly input data, it can be passed along. Such is the case with Facebook, where just opening an application automatically grants its developer access to your entire profile. And don't assume that the developer isn't going to use the information within. [...] The ads can follow you long after you click away, too. Just look at RealAge, a detailed quiz that assigns you a "biological age" based on your family history and health habits. The site, a recent investigation revealed, takes your most sensitive answers — those about sexual difficulties, say, or signs of depression — and sells them to drug companies looking to market medications.""

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Stanley Lunetta's CMOS-based instrument designs have earned a strong following among the synth-diy crowd - and for good reason. The circuits can be relatively simple and the resulting sounds quite interesting. Bchris1776 shares details about his above-seen super-patchable unit -

This Lunetta is built primarily from 4000 series CMOS integrated circuits with inputs and outputs taken to front panel jacks to be patched to other sections. This Lunetta uses counters, shift registers, XOR gates and 40106 schmidt trigger clocks and oscillators.
There are those who can make some great music with these - however I'm not one of them :)
There was no great thought put into this patch - I just plugged and played as I went. As such, every audio result was a surprise as I changed patch locations and clock speeds. I think that's half the fun of these circuits.

Head over to the Electro-music forums for more project info and users' builds.

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We've discussed in the past the rather annoying tendency of some bemoaning the trouble facing newspapers (due to bad business decisions, such as taking on too much debt) of confusing "newspapers" for "journalism." They all too often assume that newspapers are the only source of journalism, when that simply isn't true. Unfortunately, it appears that politicians are guilty of the same basic fallacy. With reports that Washington State has created a special tax break for newspapers, Danny Sullivan is asking why isn't the tax break for journalism? By singling out newspapers, the politicians are effectively punishing journalists who work for other forms of media who didn't screw up their business, and rewarding the newspaper owners and management who made so many bad decisions.

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Salim sez, "Techdirt are reporting that the data collection systems ued by BayTSP (the company appointed by the RIAA and MPAA to deal with p2p infringers) is wide-open. Thanks to BayTSP's inability to write a robots.txt file, Google has indexed just about every page on their server. You can get a good idea of the kinds of things that the company are seanding C&Ds for, including items like this which are neither movies nor music. Techdirt suggest that this information might be used by phishers seeking to impersonate BayTSP, however a more obvious notion is that it could be used by law-firms who want to know the names of everybody that BayTSP has threatened. A smart lawyer could make a great deal of money from a class-action."

Thanks, Sal!)

Braedley writes "When [Ars] last took an in-depth look at USB flash drives in 2005, the landscape was a bit different. A 2GB drive ran nearly $200, and speeds were quite a bit slower then. At the time, we noted that while the then-current crop of drives was pretty fast, they still were not close to saturating the bandwidth of USB2. To top it off, a good drive was still going to set you back $50 or $70--not exactly a cheap proposition. Since our first roundup, this picture has changed considerably, and it leads to a question: has the flash drive become an undifferentiated commodity, just like any other cheap plastic tsotschke that you might find at an office supply store checkout counter?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Dutch artist Evelien Lohbeck's "Paper Notebook" video showcases some very clever & quirky interactions with sketchbooks. I'm pretty sure there must be a similar Firefox theme out there - just wish I could get YouTube to load up in graphite as well.

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MAKE Advisory Board member Joe Grand got himself a T-Tech Quick Circuit 5000 PCB prototyping machine in the lab and has been messing around with using it to create PCB art. The third image is based on art by Neil Kronenberg, created for this year's DEFCON conference, and the last image is by our very own Phil Torrone.

Circuit Board Artwork

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Back in February, the Authors Guild, a lobby group representing less than 10,000 writers, argued that the Kindle's ability to read text aloud infringed on copyright (it doesn't -- and even if it does, the infringement lies not in including the feature, but rather in using it; this is the same principle that makes the VCR legal). Amazon folded and agreed to revoke the feature.

Now comes some news about how they're doing this, from the Knowledge Ecology International site:

Beginning yesterday, Random House Publishers began to disable text-to-speech remotely. The TTS function has apparently been remotely disabled in over 40 works so far. Affected titles include works by Toni Morrison, Stephen King, and others. Other notable titles include Andrew Meachem's American Lion, and five of the top ten Random House best-sellers in the Kindle store.

I've been trying to get a statement from Amazon about this since February: how does disabling text-to-speech work? It appears that there's a text-to-speech "flag" in the Kindle file-format that the Kindle looks for and responds to, disabling the feature if it's set to 0 (a perl script called mobi2mobi can reset the bit to 1).

But what no one at Amazon will tell me is what other flags are lurking in the Kindle format: is there a "real only once" flag? A "no turning the pages backwards" flag?

I'm specifically interested because Amazon has announced a "DRM-free" version of the Kindle format and I'd love to sell my books on the platform if it's really DRM-free. To that end, I've put three questions to Amazon:

1. Is there anything in the Kindle EULA that prohibits moving your purchased DRM-free Kindle files to a competing device?

2. Is there anything in the Kindle file-format (such as a patent or trade-secret) that would make it illegal to produce a Kindle format-reader or converter for a competing device?

3. What flags are in the DRM-free Kindle format, and can a DRM-free Kindle file have its features revoked after you purchase it?

I've sent these questions repeatedly to my contact at Amazon for months with no response. I've tweeted about it. I've sent in requests on behalf of the Guardian newspaper to their press office without even getting an acknowledgement. And I've asked a major publisher that is working with Amazon to release DRM-free versions of its books to put the question to their Amazon rep, and they haven't gotten a response.

I love Amazon's physical-goods business. I buy everything from them, from my coffee-maker to my DVDs. I love their consumer-friendly policies, and their innovative business practices. I just wish their electronic delivery business was as good as their physical goods side. I have a lot of hope for a DRM-free Kindle format, but it's downright creepy when no one at Amazon will even respond to three simple, basic questions about it.

Kindle 2 vs Reading Disabled Students

On the news that the French Assembly finally rammed through a "three strikes" rule for the French Internet (if you're accused of infringement three times, you lose the right to access the Internet), Princeton prof Ed Felten has proposed that this should be extended to other media, like print.

My proposed system is simplicity itself. The government sets up a registry of accused infringers. Anybody can send a complaint to the registry, asserting that someone is infringing their copyright in the print medium. If the government registry receives three complaints about a person, that person is banned for a year from using print.

As in the Internet case, the ban applies to both reading and writing, and to all uses of print, including informal ones. In short, a banned person may not write or read anything for a year...

Next on the list: three-strikes systems for sound waves, and light waves. These media are too important to leave unprotected.

I like it, but I have to admit to being sentimental about my proposal (stolen from Kevin Marks) to cut corporations off the Internet if they send out three false copyright accusations.

A Modest Proposal: Three-Strikes for Print

An anonymous reader writes "Founding editor of Boing Boing Cory Doctorow has written a report about 'do-it-yourself' digital licensing, which he's touting as the panacea for piracy. Doctorow's solution for content creators is two-fold: Get a Creative Commons license, and append some basic text requiring those who re-use your work to pay you a percentage of their gross income. Doctorow refers to this as the middle ground between simply acquiring a Creative Commons license and hiring expensive lawyers for negotiations. He calls do-it yourself licensing 'cheap and easy licensing that would turn yesterday's pirates into tomorrow's partners.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The ACLU is seeking to have patents on genetic tests overturned on constitutional grounds, arguing that genes are not inventions, and that patents on them do not advance science because the companies that win them are capricious and greedy and deny legitimate researchers access to the patented arts.

On May 12, 2009, the ACLU and the Public Patent Foundation at Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law (PUBPAT) filed a lawsuit charging that patents on two human genes associated with breast and ovarian cancer are unconstitutional and invalid. The lawsuit was filed on behalf of four scientific organizations representing more than 150,000 geneticists, pathologists, and laboratory professionals, as well as individual researchers, breast cancer and women's health groups, genetic counselors and individual women. Individuals with certain mutations along these two genes, known as BRCA1 and BRCA2, are at a significantly higher risk for developing hereditary breast and ovarian cancers...

"Scientific research and testing have been delayed, limited or even shut down as a result of gene patents, stifling the development of new diagnostics and treatments," said Tania Simoncelli, ACLU science advisor. "The government should be encouraging scientific innovation, not hindering it."

"Patenting human genes is counter to common sense, patent law and the Constitution," said Daniel B. Ravicher, Executive Director of PUBPAT and co-counsel in the lawsuit. "Genes are identified, not invented, and patenting genetic sequences is like patenting blood, air or e=mc2."

ACLU Challenges Patents on Breast Cancer Genes (Thanks to everyone who suggested this!)

Back in 2007, Bre Pettis etched a calendar into his thumbnails with a laser cutter. I'd love to gussy up my digits before a night out on the town with some etched bitmaps. Sure would be smarter than a boring old man-manicure (and it'd be great for cheating on exams). Why is this technology not ubiquitous?

A Calendar Laser Etched Into Fingernails (via Sciencepunk)

One of the companies that the entertainment industry hires to send out nastygrams to people it believes are file sharing illegally is BayTSP. The company tries to hunt down IP addresses and then try to notify the user. Apparently, a part of this process is also to include a link to a web form where the user can respond to the notice and tell BayTSP if you will comply with their infringement notice and remove the offending files from your computer. Except, some are noticing, that BayTSP's method of doing this isn't even remotely secure, so the response forms are available for anyone to see -- and to respond to. You can find your own with a little help from Google.

Even worse, you could send your own notices, pretending to be BayTSP, and get people to fill out the forms instead. And, on top of that, some have discovered that BayTSP's site has some scripting vulnerabilities such that you could create a fake complaint and get people to, say, download malware or enter credit card data. Once again demonstrating the high level of technical incompetence from the folks the RIAA and MPAA hire to piss off fans worldwide.

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Douglas Rushkoff is a guest blogger.

The New York Times reports that MTA city buses are losing the yellow rubber electronic strip in favor of the good ol' pull string connected to a bell. The electronic strip technology costs more to make and to maintain.

For those of us who are old enough to remember the cord-pull system, it's a welcome return of a technology with more depth, character and dependability than the rubber strip. Perhaps the best thing about the pull wire is that you can really yank on it when you're mad or frustrated - as if to ring the bell louder - even though, for the driver, the bell has the same sound. So you get to express frustration in a fully gestural way, without actually annoying anyone, or spreading the anxiety any further.

The New York Times

After a long legal wrangle, some defendant-side attorneys have audited the source-code of Alcotest, the breathalyzer used in New Jersey DUI stops. Turns out it was programmed by muppets who don't know how to calculate an average and who throw out error messages by the dozen.

Like voting-machine vendors, breathlyzer vendors go crazy when defendants ask to have their source-code audited, claiming that there's a bunch of top-s33kr1t stuff in there that their competitors would steal. And, just like voting-machine software, breathalyzer software appears to have been written by squirrels dancing on the keyboard until they got something that would compile.

2. Readings are Not Averaged Correctly: When the software takes a series of readings, it first averages the first two readings. Then, it averages the third reading with the average just computed. Then the fourth reading is averaged with the new average, and so on. There is no comment or note detailing a reason for this calculation, which would cause the first reading to have more weight than successive readings. Nonetheless, the comments say that the values should be averaged, and they are not...

4. Catastrophic Error Detection Is Disabled: An interrupt that detects that the microprocessor is trying to execute an illegal instruction is disabled, meaning that the Alcotest software could appear to run correctly while executing wild branches or invalid code for a period of time. Other interrupts ignored are the Computer Operating Property (a watchdog timer), and the Software Interrupt.

SUMMARY OF THE SOFTWARE HOUSE FINDINGS FOR THE SOURCE CODE OF THE DRAEGER ALCOTEST 7110 MKIII-C (via Schneier)

Over in the Steampunk Workshop, Jake von Slatt has posted pics of a Wimshurst Influence Machine built by a MAKE reader, following Jake's project piece in Volume 17. Nice job, Scott! He built his with more sectors on the disks, to make it even more zaptastic.

Scott's Wimshurst Machine!

From MAKE magazine:

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

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

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

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Over on Boing Boing Gadgets, our Lisa's spotted this nifty wig-sterilizer, because "bacteria can live in your hairpiece for weeks."

The Wig Purifier is an airtight tube that you can stick your wig in at the end of the day for automatic sterilization and deodorization. Apparently it uses ozone air to work its magic--ten minutes in the faux-suede Purifier will give you a fresh head. It's $367. Check out the cheesy promo video below.

Wig Purifier uses ozone power to clean your hair piece

Discuss this on Boing Boing Gadgets

Here's a pretty good roundup, courtesy of Scienceray, of all the human-made junk left behind on the Moon. I think you could probably finance a private moonshot by preselling all this stuff to museums and collectors!

The Apollo program left behind it (as did Lunokhod 2) several vital pieces of Lunar laser ranging equipment. Lasers down here on earth are pointed at the ones on the moon and the time in which it takes the light to return is measured. In this way the distance to the moon can be measured and monitored. Apollo 11 left the first one in 1969 and it has had forty years of continuous operation ever since. Apart from these few pieces of equipment, the rest of the items on the surface of the moon are redundant - or destroyed by impact. Welcome to the most distant trash can we have.

Lunar Leftovers: How the Moon Became a Trash Can (Thanks, RJ!)

A dengue fever vaccine being developed with funding from the Gates Foundation takes a novel approach: it's an "altruistic" vaccine that you take after you get sick. It renders your blood poisonous to the mosquitoes who spread the disease, which means that your neighbors won't catch your fever.

Professor Young says dengue is a problem which affects millions around the world and mosquito transmitted pathogens such as dengue and malaria are a significant disease burden on the world's population.

His aim is to develop a novel vaccine approach that is based on blocking mosquito transmission of these disease agents rather than inducing pathogen-specific immunity.

Money from Bill and Melinda Gates will help beat Dengue fever in Australia (via /.)

Any statue of a man with one hand held out before him at waist height can be photographed in profile in such a way that the extended hand looks like a big ole boner. And Soviet-era statues of Lenin have this posture in spades. Hence this collection on Lenin monuments sporting vast, steely commie-ons. (Famously, you can reproduce this effect with the famous "Partners" statue at Disneyland, which depicts Walt holding Mickey's hand; from the right angle, Mickey's nose becomes Walt's stiffy).

A Different Angle of View on Lenin Monuments (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)

With the lawsuit between the movie studios and RealNetworks off to an inauspicious start, it looks like RealNetworks decided to pull out the nuclear option: it's trying to add anti-trust charges against the movie studios to the case. The company claims it's come across evidence that the studios colluded to boycott RealNetworks and its attempt to let people back up their legally obtained movies. It would be interesting to know the details behind the evidence, as it could make the case a lot more exciting pretty quickly.

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Announcing our new bundles available exclusively in the Maker Shed. This time it's our Learn to solder bundle. This bundle includes a bunch of great products that will get you on your way to being a soldering pro in no time. Keep an eye out for a lot more great bundles exclusively in the Maker Shed.

The Learn to solder bundle includes:

• (1) Learn to Solder Kit $14.95 value
  
• (1) Solder Practice Kit $9.95 value
  
• (1) Maker's Notebook $19.99 value
  
• (1) MAKE Volume 01 $14.99 value (featuring a learn to solder article)
  

All of these items are bundled together for the discounted price of $39.95. That's more than 30% off if you were to purchase them individually.

More about the Learn to solder bundle in the Maker Shed

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QuantumG writes "The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has awarded a $100,000 grant to the University of Queensland, Australia to develop a vaccine against dengue fever, a disease spread by mosquitoes. Unlike other vaccines, the 'altruistic vaccine' doesn't specifically protect the individual being bitten, but instead protects the community by stopping the transmission of the pathogen from one susceptible individual to another. The hope is to do this by effectively making their blood poisonous to mosquitoes, either killing them or at least preventing them from feeding on other individuals. Professor Paul Young explained how his work fell outside current scientific traditions and might lead to significant advances in global health — he said he could envision the vaccine being used around the world within 10 years, and would be designed to be cheap and easy to implement."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

While US courts have generally been good about recognizing that eBay is not liable for eBay users selling counterfeit goods on the site, France in the past had gotten the story backwards, saying that eBay was liable, even though the actions were by its users, not by eBay itself. However, in a rather surprising move, a French court has actually sided with eBay against L'Oreal in a similar case. This is a surprise -- but a good one. This is L'Oreal's second loss in such cases against eBay. It lost another such case in nearby Belgium -- but (of course) has also filed similar lawsuits around the globe, hoping that at least one of those courts will side with it over eBay. Hopefully, all of them take notice of how both Belgium and France have ruled, and recognize that this is not eBay's liability.

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• The "getting-ready-for-marriage" bra: counts down until the big day AND plays the wedding march.

• The MSI X340 X-Thin netbook reviewed. Click here for the verdict.

• Twitt jr = what happens when you pump your Twitter stream through an IBM PCjr with a 4.77MHz processor and 16-color monitor.

• Find out why the latest wi-fi internet radio from Vtech is kind of a snoozer.

• Back in the day, young home chemists didn't wear safety gear We have proof..

• A gorgeous folding bike from Areaware (yes). That costs $2,250 (oof).

• The covers of back issues of science journal Advanced Materials are crazy beautiful.

• A wooden version of the Amazon Kindle that's only $61. They call it "Kindling."

• Wigs and hairpieces need purifiers?

• Rugged flip-flops fit for a ninja or ninja turtle.

• The Mossad Pen writes with visible ink that disappears when hit with a hairdryer.

AT&T caught a lot of flak at the beginning of April, when it updated the terms of service for its mobile data network, banning all sorts of activities on it. AT&T later said the changes had been made in "error" and removed the new language, though it later reinserted language banning "redirecting television signals for viewing on Personal Computers" -- a ban apparently aimed directly at the forthcoming SlingPlayer application for the iPhone, which lets users watch TV from their Slingbox at home on their mobile device. The app has now been released, but it only works over WiFi, not the 3G mobile connection, because AT&T says, in a nutshell, that its mobile network doesn't have enough capacity to support streaming-video services if they take off. So all those cool data applications Apple and AT&T tout for the iPhone or other smartphones sold by the operator? Just remember they exist only at the behest of the carrier; if they threaten to expose its network's shortcomings, they'll get blocked.

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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Randy over at Instructables made this handy and simple laptop stand by bending some acrylic. He cut the attractive and heat-dissipating holes with a laser cutter, which you could do by sending it off to Ponoko, or cut them out by hand with a hole saw or Forstner bit. This simple project gives me lots of ideas for modifications and expansions to fully customize your own laptop stand for a fraction of the cost of a commercial one.

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Dante_J writes "In the Australian Federal budget presented last night, as well as big national infrastructure spending, an amount of $48.6 million over four years was allocated for an 'Australian Space Science Program.' Normally a Space Program is managed by a Space Agency. Does this now mean that Australian will follow the recommendations of the Senate Space Science report and give up its rather inadequate title of the only top-20 GDP nation not to have one? With nations like Vietnam, Bangladesh and Bulgaria forming or maintaining Space Agencies, this government infrastructure is obviously not limited to G-20 nations. Discussions to combine Australian and New Zealand airspace have been undertaken; should that translate to aerospace too, and both nations form an ANZAC Space Agency together?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

President Obama announced today that he will move to block the release of photos documenting American military personnel torturing detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan, saying the images could "further inflame anti-American opinion."

What BS. You know what will help dampen those flames? An end to war crimes impunity, and the dawn of that true transparency he promised America during his presidential campaign. Instead, we're dealt yet another civil liberties disappointment.

Snip from NYT story:

As he left the White House to fly to Arizona for an evening commencement address, Mr. Obama briefly explained his abrupt reversal on releasing the photographs. He said the pictures, which he has reviewed, "are not particularly sensational, but the conduct did not conform with the Army manual." He did not take questions from reporters, but said disclosing the photos would have "a chilling effect" on future attempts to investigate detainee abuse.

The president's decision marks a sharp reversal from a decision made last month by the Pentagon, which agreed in a case with the American Civil Liberties Union to release photographs showing incidents at Abu Ghraib and a half-dozen other prisons. At the time, the president signed off on the decision, saying he agreed with releasing the photos.

Read the NYT story here, and the ACLU's statement on today's news is here. Snip:

The Obama administration's adoption of the stonewalling tactics and opaque policies of the Bush administration flies in the face of the president's stated desire to restore the rule of law, to revive our moral standing in the world and to lead a transparent government. This decision is particularly disturbing given the Justice Department's failure to initiate a criminal investigation of torture crimes under the Bush administration.

Obama isn't just "Bush Lite" with regard to these issues, he's continuing the exact same policies of the Bush administration and in some matters, expanding those powers further. Nothing "lite" about that.

Read more about the torture documents the ACLU obtained under FOIA here.

Update: Mark Frauenfelder tweets, "Here's a quick form to email President Obama telling him you support transparency and accountability."

On Monday, we wrote about the Wisconsin ruling that police didn't violate anyone's rights in putting a GPS device on the car of someone they were tracking. It didn't take long for a different court in a different case to disagree. A bunch of folks have sent in the news that a court in NY had tossed out a similar case, claiming that the GPS evidence was illegally obtained. The ruling lays out many of the reasons why such technologies aren't the same as simply observing what someone does in public:

"What the technology yields and records with breathtaking quality and quantity is a highly detailed profile, not simply of where we go, but by easy inference, of our associations -- political, religious, amicable and amorous, to name only a few -- and of the pattern of our professional and avocational pursuits."

I expect that we'll be seeing many more such cases in the next few years until this is settled either by the law or the Supreme Court.

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Folks looking for a little tube time with the new SlingPlayer iPhone app whilst bounding about outside of their Wi-Fi comfort zone can breathe easy again. Sebastien over at iPhone Download Blog has posted a short tutorial explaining how to get the SlingPlayer app to run over 3G and Edge networks. It's assumed you've already purchased all relevant products and services and don't mind taking the extra steps necessary for true ownership.

Use a SlingPlayer over 3G

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eldavojohn writes "What do you do when a foreign species has been introduced to your land from another continent? Bring over the natural predator from the other continent. Scientists in Texas have introduced four kinds of phorid flies from South America to fight fire ants. These USDA approved flies dive bomb ants and lay an egg inside the ant. The maggot hatches and eats away juicy tender delicious ant brain until the ant is nothing more than a zombie that wanders around for two weeks before the head falls off and the ant dies. A couple of these flies will cause the ants to modify their behavior and this will be a very slow acting solution to curb the $1 billion in damage these ants do to Texas cattle ranches and--oddly enough--electrical equipment like circuit breakers. You may remember zombifying parasites hitting insects like cockroaches."

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What goes better with a Cigar Box Guitar (MAKE Volume 04) than a Cracker Box Amp? Author Ed Vogel presented us this project in MAKE Volume 09 for just that reason. It's like chocolate and peanut butter, really. Ed linked up with Blind Lightnin' Pete, who shared the design for the amp and let Ed modify it. Ed's version is a workable little practice amp with parts and tools that can all be purchased from RadioShack and can be built in an hour. Here's a glance at the materials list:

A fun project to work on, cheap to build, and priceless when you see people's facial expressions at you playing a cigar box amplified through a cracker box. Here's the whole project in our Digital Edition. Make sure to check out the project page for video footage of Blind Lightnin' Pete playing the "Out of Milk and Butter Blues," and for an extensive and lively discussion of the build.

If you don't already own Volume 09, unfortunately we're sold out, but if you subscribe, all of the back issues will be at your disposal through the Digital Edition.

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It appears that Egypt is the latest country to think that it can ban certain websites by court mandate. In this case, it's all pornographic websites, which have been deemed "venomous and vile" by the court. The lawyer who was arguing against those sites responded happily: "Thank God we won, now the government should stop these electronic dens of vice immediately." Of course, what's been left unstated is exactly how the government can stop pornographic websites? My guess is they'll demand ISPs do it for them. However, in the meantime, we're left wondering how these "venomous and vile" sites are forcing themselves on poor Egyptians. I do plenty of web surfing and have found that simply not surfing porn websites is a rather effective way to not have to deal with such "electronic dens of vice."

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Warren Ellis has asked comics creators to talk up their latest creations, for people about to head down to the local funnybook emporium. The resulting thread is a great resource for people looking to discover new comix gems:

So... any creators here have a book coming out this week? I'm putting out a call, and I'm suspecting it'll be a bust this week, but maybe...?

If you do: want to mention it? Talk about it? Point at a website, a blog entry, a bit of art, whatever... let these many thousands of people with disposable income know about it?

Printheads: This Week In Comics (13may09)

In my latest Guardian column, "When love is harder to show than hate," I look at the fact that copyright protects critics who want to talk trash about creative works, but gives no real protection to people who want to say nice things about them.

The damage here is twofold: first, this privileges creativity that knocks things down over things that build things up. The privilege is real: in the 21st century, we all rely on many intermediaries for the publication of our works, whether it's YouTube, a university web server, or a traditional publisher or film company. When faced with legal threats arising from our work, these entities know that they've got a much stronger case if the work in question is critical than if it is celebratory. In the digital era, our creations have a much better chance of surviving the internet's normal background radiation of legal threats if you leave the adulation out and focus on the criticism. This is a selective force in the internet's media ecology: if you want to start a company that lets users remix TV shows, you'll find it easier to raise capital if the focus is on taking the piss rather than glorifying the programmes.

Second, this perverse system acts as a censor of genuine upwellings of creativity that are worthy in their own right, merely because they are inspired by another work. It's in the nature of beloved works that they become ingrained in our thinking, become part of our creative shorthand, and become part of our visual vocabulary. It's no surprise, then, that audiences are moved to animate the characters that have taken up residence in their heads after reading our books and seeing our movies. The celebrated American science-fiction writer Steven Brust produced a fantastic, full-length novel, My Own Kind of Freedom, inspired by the television show Firefly. Brust didn't - and probably can't - receive any money for this work, but he wrote it anyway, because, he says, "I couldn't help myself".

When love is harder to show than hate

Dark Roasted Blend's roundup of civilian-accessible spy gizmos will be largely familiar to attentive readers of this blog, but it's nice to have all this stuff in one place, from the hollow coins to the pens that turn into deadly! stabby! knives!

Real Life Spy Gadgets - For the secret agent in all of us (via Beyond the Beyond)

A worker at one of AT&T's San Jose offices opened a refrigerator full of rotten, forgotten cow-orker chow and released a gas so noxious that the building had to be evacuated and a hazmat team had to be called in.

Authorities said an enterprising office worker had decided to clean it out, placing the food in a conference room while using two cleaning chemicals to scrub down the mess. The mixture of old lunches and disinfectant caused 28 people to need treatment for vomiting and nausea.

Authorities said the worker who cleaned the fridge didn't need treatment -- she can't smell because of allergies.

Rotten office fridge cleanup sends 7 to hospital (via /.)

Cory's recent column, titled "If you can't open government, you don't own it", didn't agree with a reader. So he ripped out the page from the magazine, wrote his farewell message below and sent it to us in a nice, old-fashioned letter. Well, we opened it and now we own it.

It will hang proudly on our office wall!

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Pedro sez, "The WotWots is a pre-schooler's TV show with an elaborate steampunk aesthetic. The two main characters travel in beautifully rendered spaceship that is steampunk inside and out - apart from the pink and blue shagpile mattress on their oval brass bed. The show is made in New Zealand at the Weta Workshop - responsible for the special effects in Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings movies. According to their website, Richard Taylor, the creative lead at Weta, has received five Oscars, four Baftas and numerous other awards."

The Wotwots (Thanks, Pedro!)

John from the Free Software Foundation sez, "When the RIAA chose to attack the Free Software Foundation over our submission of an amicus brief in one of their filesharing cases, it raised some questions -- not about the RIAA's legal strategy of suggesting that the FSF should not be able to file a brief at all, which was clearly baseless -- but about why an organization working on software freedom cares enough about these lawsuits to intervene, and about what exactly the FSF's position on copyright is, given that we rely on it for the GNU General Public license to protect free software."

The War on Sharing: Why the FSF Cares About RIAA Lawsuits (Thanks, John!)

Ape Lad sez, "Several months ago on Twitter I made a passing remark that it would be kinda neat if someone tweeted Moby-Dick. 12,849 updates later, and thanks to the wizardry of Dan Coulter, it's done. Enjoy Ishmael's adventure 140 characters at a time."

Tweeting Moby Dick (Thanks, Ape Lad!)

Marilyn sez, "NASA astronaut Don Pettit was tired of drinking from straws all the time in space, 'You feel like an insect sucking juices out of another insect,' so on a mission last November he fashioned a drinking cup that would work in zero gravity via capillary action. He used a sheet of plastic and some tape. You can see a photo of it on this National Geographic blog along with the mathematical calculations that explain how it works."

Don Pettit did a great interview on NPR's Science Friday about this and his other space-inventions.

No Gravity, No Straw: Birth of a Space Cup (Thanks, Marilyn!)

Alex from Worldchanging sez, "We're doing an ideas auction to benefit Worldchanging: cool conference tickets, adventure science trips, art and design, all of which is about the kinds of innovation we cover here. Bidding is not exactly hot, which means somebody has the chance to walk away with some real steals here! This is really phenomenal stuff -- platinum passes to SxSW, original limited-edition Ed Burtynsky prints, a trip to see polar bears in their native habitat -- and most of it is currently going for a small fraction of the street price. Plus, because it's a charity auction (all proceeds benefit Worldchanging, a nonprofit), U.S. taxpayers can get a tax deduction as well! Awesome (and cheap) prizes, a good cause, and money saved on taxes. Seems like a good deal! The auction closes 10:00 a.m. Friday ({acific time). So only one day to get these deals!"

Crazy-great bargains on awesome stuff at Worldchanging's charity auction (Thanks, Alex!)

Douglas Rushkoff is a guest blogger.

Nate Dimeo, an NPR reporter, has been creating some fascinating audio at a site he called The Memory Palace. These are highly textured historical narratives about stuff we might not know or remember.

My favorite is a piece on a widespread fear among the British that Franklin had invented a lightning-bolt gun - and such rumors led many to shun lightning rods on their homes, in turn leading to countless unnecessary fires.

The Memory Palace

Here's VepoStudios's great short documentary on last weekend's Toronto Comic Arts Festival -- a spectacular, creator-centric comics show that was free to attend and right in the middle of town. I managed to get there for an hour or so (I'm in Toronto for family stuff) and it was insanely great, made me wish I could have spent the weekend there!

Toronto Comic Arts Festival 2009

In my latest Internet Evolution column, "Digital Licensing: Do It Yourself," I propose a new kind of self-serve, lightweight "commercial commons" that would allow makers to do small-scale commercial manufacturing of goods that remix copyrights and trademarks, with no upfront payments, and a fixed royalty rate that lets the makerverse operate as a giant, well-compensated R&D lab for products you should be selling:

From edge to edge, the Net is filled with creators of every imaginable tchotchke - and quite a lot of them are for sale.

And quite a lot of that is illegal.

That's because culture isn't always non-commercial. All around the physical world, you can find markets where craftspeople turn familiar items from one realm of commerce into handicrafts sold in another realm.

I have a carved wooden Coke bottle from Uganda, a Mickey Mouse kite from Chile, a set of hand-painted KISS matrioshkes from Russia. This, too, is a legitimate form of commerce, and the fact that the villager who carved my Coke bottle was impedance-mismatched with Coke and didn't send a lawyer to Atlanta to get a license before he started carving isn't a problem for him, because Coke can't and won't enforce against carvers in small stalls in marketplaces in war-torn African nations.

If only this were true for crafters on the Net. Though they deploy the same cultural vocabulary as their developing-world counterparts for much the same reason (it's the same reason Warhol used Campbell's soup cans), they don't have obscurity on their side. They live by the double-edged sword of the search-engine: The same tool that enables their customers to find them also enables rights-holders to discover them and shut them down.

It doesn't have to be this way.

Digital Licensing: Do It Yourself

Today I was thinking about what, in an ideal world, to do with the Twitter feed of the NY Times. It has 852,709 followers. That's potentially quite powerful.

This is what I came up with.

Think about two communities: 1. The people who use Twitter and those who are likely to use it in the near future. 2. The people who use the NY TImes now and in the near future.

The community you're serving with this feed is the intersection between the two.

The feed should be used to push links to stories that would interest someone in this community. But not just stories from the NY Times.

The criteria would be: Would an informed person want to know about this?

"All the news that's fit to print" meets "People come back to places that send them away."

Lots of people around the world have worked themselves into a lather over the supposed privacy invasions of Google Street View, as well as the security threat they say it creates. These fears are largely unfounded, since Street View displays images of public spaces, and since it really doesn't give would-be criminals information they couldn't easily find elsewhere; and most courts and governments have agreed. Still, the Street View backlash continues to spread, with groups in Japan and Greece the latest to take exception to it. Officials in Greece have forced Google to stop the project there until it provides more details on how long it will store photos and how it will protect people's privacy. In Japan, Google is being forced to re-shoot photos in a dozen cities because its car-mounted cameras were too high. It will lower its cameras there by 16 inches so they can't see over fences around people's homes. That's a nice gesture from Google, but will Japan also ban multi-story buildings that let people see over fences? Will ladders and scaffolding be next?

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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An anonymous reader writes "Dean Kamen, the inventor of the Segway and the founder of the FIRST Robotics Competition has been granted Patent 7,507,169, that describes one of the previous competitions. The main invention is a ranking system that ranks teams not only on their score, but their opponents' score, so teams are rewarded for helping their opponents score more. It is claimed that this ranking system promotes the made up phrases 'coopertition' and 'gracious professionalism.' It had three rejections, and even more appeals, before finally being accepted six years after the first application. While a majority of his 130 patents are for things related to his inventions, which are as diverse as medical equipment, unique uses for Stirling engines, and transportation, this one seems a little dubious. Dean opposes the Patent Reform Act of 2009, which would make it easier to overturn patents after they are granted."

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