ausekilis sends us word that a Dell spokesman said, without giving numbers, that Windows 7 pricing will be higher than Vista's or XP's. "Windows 7 pricing is potentially an obstacle to Windows 7 adoption for some users, though in just about every other aspect the operating system is beating Vista, according to a Dell marketing executive. ... [Darrell] Ward continued, 'In tough economic times, I think it's naive to believe that you can increase your prices on average and then still see a stronger swell than if you held prices flat or even lowered them. I can tell you that the licensing tiers at retail are more expensive than they were for Vista. ... Schools and government agencies may not be able to afford (the additional cost). Some of the smaller businesses may not be able to enjoy the software as soon as they'd like,' Ward said.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In the April 2009 issue of Entertainment Law & Finance, three partners in the Intellectual Property Group at Kilpatrick Stockton LLP take a look at the role that "amateur musicologists" have played thus far in the copyright battle stemming from Satriani's lawsuit against Coldplay for copyright infringement back in December. I'll include relevant quotes from the article, since you need to register for a free account in order to read the PDF.

What makes this case unique is the lively debate that it has prompted, which will likely impact how this action and similar infringement cases will be prosecuted and defended going forward. Within days of the suit's initiation, the popular Web site YouTube was inundated with postings in which fans freely offered their opinions concerning the merits of Satriani's claims (or absence there-of). Some of these submissions were supported by surprisingly detailed analyses of the works.

We saw this in the comments on Techdirt, as there was a lively debate and people were quick to mention a variety of other songs with the same melody. The article also mentions a Canadian guitar teacher who uploaded some videos to YouTube with a detailed analysis.

The parties should take note of the prior art works that have surfaced as part of the public debate. Such works could prove to be helpful to Coldplay in defending against Satriani's claims, as they could reflect that Satriani himself may have "unconsciously copied" from an earlier work.

This was written before Cat Stevens claimed that Coldplay was actually infringing his song, the "Foreigner Suite," which was one of the similar sounding tunes people had noticed online. Anyone monitoring the online discussion about the copyright battle would have had this on their radar. Also, it was Cat Stevens' son who brought the song to his attention, my guess would be as a result of discussion about the similarities online.

Or [prior art] may simply reflect these oft-quoted words from the Second Circuit: "It must be remembered that, while there are an enormous number of possible permutations of the musical notes of the scale, only a few are pleasing; and much fewer still suit the infantile demands of the popular ear. Recurrence is not therefore an inevitable badge of palgiarism." Darrell v. Joe Morris Music Corp., 113 F.2d 80, 80 (2d Cir. 1940)

This quote reinforces the idea that there are only so many ways to combine chords.

What makes the Internet commentary regarding the two songs particularly interesting is that much of it replicates the type of expert analysis that both sides will likely use if the case goes forward. In music copyright infringement cases, it is rare for parties to rely solely on bare assertions of copying or independent creation. Instead, they frequently engage "musicology" experts to undertake detailed analyses of every element of alleged similarity between the two works and conclude whether all or portions of one work were copied from the other. The parties and their experts in [this case] should consider the analyses of the "amateur musicologists" that have weighed in via the Internet and other media, if for no other reason than they may be informative of how a jury might ultimately view the case...

While Satriani v. Martin may not go to trial for a variety of reasons, it is clear that user-generated content sites like YouTube have the potential to alter the way music cases -- and other types of copyright case -- are developed. Because advances in technology allow the public to participate in real-time infringement debate, future parties would do well to monitor this "chatter" as it could uncover evidence and theories that may be helpful to the case of the copyright owner, the alleged infringer or both.

The online discussion is largely what has made this case so unique. There have been successful copyright infringement lawsuits over melodies in the past (most notably Bright Tunes v. Harrisongs), but never has the public been able to participate so much in the debate. I think it's likely that Cat Stevens' son wouldn't have known of the similarity between the melodies if not for all of the other people who noticed and highlighted it online. If the case does go to trial, the internet commentary may influence the strategy on both sides and serve as a preview of the arguments. If it doesn't go to trial, the online discussion may influence any sort of negotiation as a means of assessing opinion on the merits of the infringement claim.

The melodies are undoubtedly similar, but the legal question is whether or not Coldplay copied from Satriani. It's not just Coldplay's word against Satriani's, but music fans and "amateur musicologists" are gathering evidence and providing theories which are having a noticeable impact on the proceedings.

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.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

crazipper writes "Much fuss has been made about Nvidia's CUDA technology and its general-purpose computing potential. Now, in 2009, a steady stream of launches from third-party software developers sees CUDA gaining traction at the mainstream. Tom's Hardware takes five of the most interesting desktop apps with CUDA support and compares the speed-up yielded by a pair of mainstream GPUs versus a CPU-only. Not surprisingly, depending on the workload you throw at your GPU, you'll see results ranging from average to downright impressive."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

(Download / Watch on YouTube)

This past Sunday in Guatemala, tens of thousands of people gathered in the capital city to protest the assassination of an attorney who blamed president Álvaro Colom for his imminent murder in a posthumously-released YouTube Video.

Boing Boing Video viewer (and BB blog reader) Maria Figueroa (@thevenemousone on Twitter) was there with friends, and she sent us this eyewitness report captured on her cellphone.

Twitter has played a central role in this still-unfolding crisis: protests have been organized on this and other social networks, and Twitter user Jean "@jeanfer" Anleu went to jail last week for having posted a tweet related to the scandal. Authorities released him to house arrest, and he was forced to pay a $6,500 fine (for which he is now in debt).

The video featured here was shot on Maria's phone just as the protest was assembling. Her photos from Sunday's protest are here on Flickr. Here are more video clips documenting the protests.

snydeq writes "The Deep End's Paul Venezia argues in favor of the creation of a Technology Bill of Rights to protect individuals against malfeasance, tyranny, and exploitation in an increasingly technological age. Venezia's initial six proposed articles center on anonymity rights, net neutrality, the open-sourcing of law enforcement software and hardware, and the like. What sort of efficacy do you see such a document having, and in an ideal world, which articles do you see as imperative for inclusion in a Technology Bill of Rights?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Just as we invite guestbloggers to the Boing Boing blog, we periodically welcome guest correspondents to Boing Boing Video, our daily online video program.

I am thrilled to announce today that we have the honor of welcoming none other than Miles O'Brien, former CNN anchor and reporter, one of the most esteemed space and science journalists on the home planet, as a Boing Boing Video guest contributor.

Snip from his bio:

"Miles is a 26-year broadcast news veteran - with nearly 17 years as CNN's science, aerospace, technology and environment correspondent. He is now on his own - based in New York City - covering the same stuff across various media platforms."

Since departing CNN, Miles has been doing really interesting experiments in online media, including webcasts, features over at True Slant, live-twittering Space Shuttle launches, and other work we hope to showcase here on BB soon.

I've been watching him explore what is possible in online, independent news venues with the same sense of adventure that captivated me in his space reporting for CNN. The video he's been producing as a solo journalist is wonderful.

Miles is a personal hero. He's the best there is at what he does. It is with the absolute deepest respect that we welcome him as a guest colleague.

It's no secret that prisons are having a tough time stopping inmates from getting contraband mobile phones, which they use to communicate with others, and often to continue committing crimes. So, in an effort to send a message to prisoners, one Texas inmate who was caught with a mobile phone just had an extra 60 years tacked onto his sentence. It's unclear from all the reporting what the guy's initial sentence was, but no matter how you add it up, it's difficult to see how 60 years in prison for a contraband mobile phone fits into the confines of a sentence that matches the crime.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

coondoggie writes with news that the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has released their top nine strategic research programs via a 57-page report last week. The overarching theme seems to be big long term goals that could result in major advances in technology. "DARPA's projects run the gamut from building extremely fast, secure networks, and developing higher, longer flying unmanned aircraft to bio-related advances that help bring vaccines to a useful state faster and space technologies that offer modular satellite systems."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

(Download MP4 / Watch on YouTube)

In this episode of Boing Boing Video, guest contributor Miles O'Brien, the veteran space and science reporter formerly with CNN, speaks with astronaut Scott Parazynski as he attempts to summit Mt. Everest.

Parazynski and his team are scheduled to actually attempt the summit within the next day or two, as I understand their current plans.

They are using a personal satellite tracking device called "Spot" as a security measure. The GPS device has the added benefit of providing digital breadcrumbs of data that can be used to generate real-time maps of exactly where they are on the trail.

More of Miles "1337" O'Brien's work at True/Slant, and you can (and should) follow him here on Twitter.

Astronaut-turned-climber Scott Parazynski's Everest climb blog is here, and you can also follow him on Twitter, live from Nepal.

Below, a screengrab of their current coordinates -- and a snapshot of Scott at rest on Mount Everest. After the jump, more photos.

(Previously: Boing Boing Video: Welcome, Miles O'Brien!)

Sorry about that. Image by Origami Roman, something Deckard would have liked. (Thanks, Susannah Breslin)

A man in Bakersfield, California got high on PCP and ate his son's eyeballs out. Then the father attempted to hack his own legs off with an axe. The boy's mother, also a PCP user, came to the door just before the attack to deliver a pizza to their home, heard her son screaming for her to rescue him, but left anyway. We don't have a metadata tag that fits this story. It's been haunting me for days since I read it, even in dreams, which is why I'm finally blogging it now. Does PCP turn people into monsters, or do monsters simply turn to PCP? I can't figure it out. My god, that poor child. (Thanks, Chief Fulfiller of Needs)

[Photo: Anders Krusberg/The Martha Stewart Show]

If you're coming to our site after having seen MAKE's Editor-in-Chief Mark Frauenfelder on The Martha Stewart Show, welcome! We thought we'd take this opportunity to introduce Martha's viewers (and others who might be new to MAKE) to what we do and why. We've got a lot of different things going on and are tremendously excited by the work we do and the global community of do-it-yourself (DIY) enthusiasts we collaborate with on our many projects.

[Note: We've put together a page of (free) PDFs for all of the projects Mark demonstrated on the show. You can find that here.]

Maker Media is the name of our company, we're a division of O'Reilly Media, the highly regarded technology publisher. Under the Maker Media umbrella, we produce the quarterly MAKE magazine, run two busy websites, Make: Online and CRAFT, produce annual DIY festivals, called Maker Faire, run a store, called Maker Shed, and work with Twin Cities Public Television who produce the popular Make: television program on PBS.

---

MAKE Magazine > >
MAKE magazine is how we got started in all of this. It's a quarterly technology projects magazine and a sort of house organ for the maker/DIY movement. Projects in the magazine range from old-school balsa wood and tissue-paper airplanes to what to do with old high-tech gadgets to building autonomous robots from techno-junk. Our current issue, Volume 18, is entitled "ReMake America," and explores sustainability and how to prosper in these challenging times using DIY technology and good ol' human ingenuity. We produce both a print and a digital edition of our magazine. You can subscribe here and find back issues here.

 

Make: Online > >
Make: Online is the award-winning website that you're reading right now. It is one of the most popular online watering holes for makers, crafters, inventors, tinkers, and amateur technologists and scientists of all stripes who come here for breaking DIY stories, original content on building, repairing, and making things, and for how-to project articles. We also have several popular video series that run every week on the site: Weekend Projects, MAKE Presents, and How-To Tuesday, that present cool projects, kit builds, and explain (in plain English) how various technologies work. Here's a recent Weekend Project:

 

CRAFT > > CRAFT is Make: Online's sister site. This is sewing, knitting, cooking, gardening, and decorating for a tech-savvy 21st century. Take a look each day for a new how-to project, from making jewelry out of plastic bottles to LED embroidery. Bookmark the blog and find the best of what's happening in the craft world as well as bi-weekly videos and downloadable patterns. CRAFT Summer Camp kicks off today with fun kids craft projects all summer long!

 

Maker Faire > >

Maker Faire is our annual DIY festival, makers meet-up, show and tell, and celebration of creativity, invention, self-directed learning, and the incomparable joys of making. We've held Faires in the SF/Bay Area for the last four years and in Austin, TX for the past two. A Maker Faire UK took place in Newcastle, UK this spring, the first event over seas. Last year's Bay Area Faire attracted some 65,000 people. Apparently, there are more people interested in art cars, a life-size mousetrap game, human-powered carnival rides, rocketry and robots, Tesla coils, and swap-o-ramas than you might think. This year's Bay Area Faire, May 30 & 31, is inspired by the president's call to "the risk-takers, the doers, the makers of things" in his Inaugural address, and his challenge to begin the "remaking of America."

 

Maker Shed > >
The Maker Shed is easy to describe. Think of the coolest technology bookstore, museum gift shop, arts & craft shop, and electronics store you can dream up -- now roll them all into one. That's the idea behind the Maker Shed. It's an irresistible collection of books, kits, robots, microcontrollers, science sets, electronics, craft tools and supplies, all curated by us, the people behind MAKE and CRAFT. It's all of the wondrous stuff we'd want to find in such a store. Maker Shed is a year-round online store and we also set up full-size retail operations at each of our Maker Faires.

To introduce you to MAKE and to the Maker Shed, we've put together a special "Welcome to MAKE" bundle. It includes a one-year subscription to MAKE (four issues), a copy of The Best of MAKE, a 380-page collection of our favorite projects from the first ten issues, and a copy of The Maker's Notebook, a unique project notebook, with plenty of high-quality graph paper for sketching out your projects, and a reference section in the back of weights, measures, facts, figures, and other indispensable info geared towards makers and crafters. The bundle saves you $41 off buying the items individually.

 

Make: television > >
Make: television is the DIY series for a new generation! It celebrates all manner of "maker" - the inventors, artists, geeks, crafters, basement scientists, and just plain folks who mix new and old technology to create newfangled contraptions. The series encourages everyone to invent, re-invent, recycle, upcycle, and act up. Each half-hour episode inspires millions to think, create, and make cool, unusual, and useful objects. Some of the projects on the show have included a burrito blaster(!), a VCR-driven cat feeder, a cigar box guitar, a simple digital TV Antenna, a wind turbine, and a how to on building solar-powered robots from junk and basic electronics. Make: television began showing nationwide on Public Television stations and online at makezine.tv in January 2009. All of the episodes are now available online. Here's a sample from a Maker Profile segment, from episode 110, of Syuzi Pakhchyan, author of Fashioning Technology.

Maker Profile - Wearable Technology on Make: television from make magazine on Vimeo.

 

We hope you enjoy our offerings and will join us in our quest to put the joy of making things back into our hectic modern lives. The full title of our magazine is "Make: technology on your time." We're all about taking back control of our technology rather than having it overwhelm us. We do everything we can to learn about the technology in our lives, to improve upon it, make it our own, and to share what we've learned with the growing community of fellow makers. We hope you'll join us on this journey. And if you want to get a truly thrilling and eye-opening experience of the length and breadth of the maker movement, come to this month's Maker Faire (May 30, 31). We can assure you it's like nothing you've ever experienced and that you will come away truly inspired.

Here's a list of the projects Mark demonstrated on the show and links to free PDFs of all the how-to articles for them found in MAKE magazine.

If you have questions about Maker Media, or any of our projects, please feel free to ask in the comments feature below.

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Makers | Digg this!

Andrew Baron of Rocketboom called earlier today with a question.

He's getting ready to launch a new video aggregation site called Magma. I'll have more about the site when it's ready to launch.

As part of the service they check with several major services to see if they have any information about the videos they're presenting. Today the site is making 30,000 calls a day to each site. As it ramps up it'll make hundreds of thousands of calls, and eventually millions, every day.

Now the question is -- must they contact Digg, Reddit, YouTube, Twitter, etc to inform them and/or get permission? At what point will they be throttled? What's the proper way to make contact?

I asked him to post something on this, and he has.

I'll be very interested to hear the answer myself.

(Rudy Rucker is a guestblogger. His latest novel, Hylozoic, describes a postsingular world in which everything is alive.)

What's up with so many young people shaving their heads bald? The thing is, if you're at all overweight, you're going to have a lipless slit-mouth wrinkle on your nape. So your back is like an eyeless alien face.

Not to be dissing these guys, but what's wrong with a nice modest fringe of hair like balding guys used to have? And why does everyone wear their sunglasses on the top of their head these days, even at night, even in the movies? I expected more from the 21st Century.

The Urban Dictionary has some gnarly slang entries relating to neck rolls.

And some guy wrote a choleric song on his blog about a guy with a shaved head talking on his cell phone, "Loud Bald Fat Man on the Metro" .

You scream at your boss through your cell
that you are going to be 15 minutes late for work.
Lucky, lucky boss.

Here's a sweet steampunk raygun, homebrewed from camera and radio parts:

The Atomic Disruptor Raygun is straight out of steampunk fiction. The cool DIY raygun has been put together by Cohophoto entirely from old radio and camera parts. If you are looking for a slice of futuristic fantasy, Cocophoto has illustrated the project on his Flickr photoset. Though short on words, the pictures show the construction details of the gun.

Make a Steampunk "Atomic Disruptor" Raygun from Old Parts

Atomic Disruptor on Flickr

(via Make)

narramissic writes "Programmers may not think that their rituals are unusual, but if you swear that your code is less buggy if you recite it aloud or you prepare for coding by listening to certain music, don't be surprised if you get a couple sideways glances. In a recent ITworld article, Issac Kelly, Lead Developer at Servee.com, explains his routine and why it works: 'To me, programming is really the 'last mile' to getting something done. When I do the planning and specifications, I go on lots of walks, take lots of time with my wife, and really do as little work in front of the computer as possible. The more I plan (in my head, on paper, on a whiteboard) the less I program; and all of my rituals are to that end.' His ritual goes like this: 'Before sitting down to a coding session, he gets a big glass of water, takes everything off of his desk, and closes out all programs and e-mail, keeping open only his code editor. The office door is shut, and some sort of music is playing ('typically an instrumental only, like my 'Explosions in the Sky' pandora station,' says Kelly).'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It really is bizarre that nearly every handwaving critique of how "evil" the internet is, from the point of view of elitists who worry about the loss of the old gatekeepers, seems to make every single mistake it accuses the "internet generation" of making. For example, it's difficult to catalog just how many things Bryan Appleyard gets factually wrong in his Sunday Times piece all about how evil the internet is and how it was designed by a bunch of California cultists who are trying to destroy all that is good in the world. What's amazing, for such an elitist article that claims that professionals do news better and that the internet is destroying the ability for the press to do journalism properly, is that he would make a factual error in almost every sentence. It's really stunning, actually.

Late in the piece he notes that "this article -- it always happens -- will be sneered at all over the web by people who cannot think for themselves because they are blindly faithful to the idea that the web is the future, all of it." Ok, fine. Let's not sneer, and let's actually think for ourselves... and how about we correct some of Mr. Appleyard's errors -- just for the fun of it?

The web is in trouble. Last week craigslist, a vast classified-ads site, had to abandon its "erotic services" category because of claims that it was an "online brothel" being used by sexual predators.

Oops. Wrong. First of all, it didn't "have" to do anything. The law (section 230 of the CDA for Mr. Appleyard, and if he wants the relevant cases we can point those out too -- though, this is the sort of stuff we thought the professionals were supposed to look up themselves) is quite clear that Craigslist is protected and it didn't have to do anything. It chose to make a change to the way it handled such ads, but Mr. Appleyard even gets the facts wrong there, in claiming it "abandoned" the category. It did not. It simply moved it to a new area called "adult services," which now has its ads pre-monitored as opposed to post-monitored as before.

And in France L'Oreal discovered eBay could not be forced to stop selling cheap knock-offs of its products.

Oops. Wrong. A French court ruled that eBay was not liable for users selling counterfeit L'Oreal goods (the same way US and Belgian courts have ruled as well). It's not eBay selling the goods. eBay is just the tool and the platform. It's users who sell to each other. And they are still breaking the law. All the court case said was that L'Oreal should have to go after those individuals, rather than forcing eBay to do so. This is common sense, in the same way that we ticket the driver of a speeding car, rather than Ford for making a car that can speed.

After British villages rose up against the intrusion of Google's Street View, Greece has banned the mobile camera cars that put pictures of people's homes and streets on the internet

Oops. Wrong. While British villagers who didn't quite understand how Street View worked got quite upset about it -- that part is true -- their protest went nowhere. The UK's privacy watchdog actually took the time to understand what Google was doing (something Appleyard apparently did not) and said it was fine. As for Greece, it did not ban the camera cars. It simply put the project on hold while it gets more info. That seems like a rather pertinent detail. Oh, and the wonderful professional mainstream media that Appleyard is such a big fan of? It reposted all the embarrassing images that Google took down. So, Google was quick to remove those images, but it was the professional media that actually got them attention. Based on Appelyard's reasoning above, concerning both Craigslist and the L'Oreal/eBay case, the mainstream press is actually guilty of intruding on people's privacy.

Privacy campaigners fear the power of Google and the online ad company Phorm to gather and exploit personal information. They invade your computer, monitor your web-browsing and buying, check where you are and then bombard you with targeted hard sells.

Oops. Wrong. While there are some fears (some more reasonable than others) about Phorm and Google, to lump the two together is quite misleading. The two companies are amazingly different in how they work -- and it's a bit of a stretch to claim that either "gathers and exploits" personal info, though we'll grant that for the time being. The thing that neither of them do, however, is "bombard you with targeted hard sells." In fact, whether you like what either company is doing, the whole point of their targeted advertising is to offer up soft sells that are more likely to get attention, rather than hard sells.

Those are the first two paragraphs alone. From there, he charges that a group of Californians created Web 2.0 as a "cult," in partnership with Google, who somehow proactively monitors everything you do (ignoring, of course, the fact that you have to actually use Google's services for it to monitor anything). Then he complains that free stuff is available online, along with the standard complaints about how he doesn't like social networks and he hates the fact that many people use the web to shop? Why? That's not really explained. The best he can come up with is quoting some guy who insists the internet is a passing fad:

"The internet", says David Edgerton, professor of the history of technology at Imperial College London and author of The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History since 1900, "is rather passe . . . It's just a means of communication, like television, radio or newspapers."

The evidence for this? Well, that's shaky and non-existent. The evidence against it? Well, I'd say there's a ton. But we'll just start with the obvious one: television, radio and newspapers were all broadcast forms of communication -- one to many. The internet is many to many (and one to one, and one to many). To claim that it's basically the same is like claiming that automobiles are just faster horses.

One great promise of web 2.0 was that it would lead to a post-industrial world in which everything was dematerialised into a shimmer of electrons. But last year's oil price shock and this year's recession, not to mention every year's looming eco-catastrophe, show that we are still utterly dependent on the heavy things of the old economy.

This is just great. Appleyard claims what "the promise" of web 2.0 is, without any citation to back that up. I don't know anyone who ever claimed that the point of "web 2.0" was to "dematerialize" everything into electrons. In fact, many of us have focused on how physical things still matter quite a bit. But, if you're trying to set up the creators of modern web services as evil cultists, you may as well set up a total straw man about what they're trying to do. Because, we all know that the "professional press" never makes stuff up like all those crazy amateurs do.

So what, if not everything, will the web change? The key feature of web 2.0 that is currently driving change is its intense focus on the individual.

That's funny. I could have sworn we were just reading about how the backers of the web were trying to make everything "communal" with all this sharing and "amateur empowerment" and such. And now we're told that web 2.0 is about individualism? Wasn't Appleyard just sneering at all those community sites like Facebook and Twitter -- which are the very opposite of an intense focus on the individual?

Blogging, tweeting and Facebooking all give the individual the unprecedented opportunity to blather to the entire world.

Wait, so communicating with others is all about individualism? I'm confused...

The first objection to this is that it destroys institutions and structures that can do so much more than the individual.

What is this "it" that destroys institutions and structures that can do so much for the individual? Web 2.0? How is "it" destroying anything? "It" is not doing anything at all. However, managers of those institutions who failed to adapt to a new marketplace (and, in the case of newspapers bet the farm on raising way more money than they could ever pay back) certainly had a lot to do with destroying institutions. But, do we see any analysis of that? Of course not.

The Wall Street Journal carried an analysis that is still the best thing I have seen on the subject. But the story needed half a dozen qualified financial journalists to put it together, and masses of research that no lonely blogger could possibly do . . . This throws into relief the intractable fact that the liberty which the web offers to the individual voice is also a restriction on group effort.

Fair enough. Though, I'll say that by far the best analysis I got of the financial crisis came from a series of different blogs (mainly by economists) that understood the issue at a far deeper level than anything I read in the Wall Street Journal. And, the great thing was that many of them did work together. They used those awful "individualistic" tools like blogging, Twitter and Facebook to connect and talk and come out with a much more interesting analysis.

Institutions -- publishers, newspapers, museums, universities, schools -- exist precisely because they can do more than individuals. If web 2.0 flattens everything to the level of whim and self-actualisation, then it will have done more harm than good.

I'm still quite confused by this odd, and totally unsupported theory, that web 2.0 somehow breaks everything down to the individual. In fact, most of us have seen the opposite. The rise of useful communication tools actually make it much easier to create those sorts of necessary institutions on the fly, in a way that's a lot more flexible, meaningful, relevant and useful than the old stodgy organizational structures of the past.

A further objection to the cult's radical individualism is that it doesn't have the intended hyper-democratic consequences. Wikipedia, for example, has tackled inaccuracy and subversion by introducing forms of authority and control that would seem to be anathema to its founding ideals.

Note that Appleyard does not explain what those "founding ideals" are, or how the minor changes to the system over time go against them or somehow prove "radical individualism" (which is still something Appleyard seems to have made up whole cloth) to be wrong.

Bloggery is forming itself into big, institutionalised aggregators such as The Huffington Post and The Daily Beast, and remains utterly parasitic on the mainstream media it affects to despise.

Um... wait. Weren't we just being told a single paragraph ago that blogs were the antithesis of institutions? I mean... it was right there. And now, suddenly, blogs are evil because they're institutions? I'm confused again. And I'm curious how sending sites more traffic is "parasitic," but we've discussed this before.

Even Twitter is already coming to be dominated by conventional, non-web-based celebrity -- Oprah Winfrey in the US and Stephen Fry over here.

Dominated. Mr. Appleyard, you don't have to follow them. I follow neither Oprah nor Fry, and Twitter works just great. I see no domination.

The slightly more sinister aspect of this is that excessive individualism leads with astonishing rapidity to slavish conformity. The banking crisis may not have been caused by the internet but it was certainly fuelled by the way connectivity and speed created a market in which everybody was gripped by the hysteria of the herd.

Now there's a new one. This one comes just three paragraphs after Appleyard tells us that the WSJ had a great analysis of why the financial crisis happened -- though, it appears Appleyard didn't bother to read it. Nor has he apparently read any history of bubbles or mass hysteria. The market crash of 1929? Mass hysteria. Must have been caused by the internet. I'm sure the Dutch tulip craze was caused by the same. There couldn't have been any herd mentality-based bubbles prior to the internet, could there? I'm sure the Sunday Times has a big professional research department (you know, the sort of institutional resources that individualistic bloggers can't afford). Perhaps next time, Appleyard should try using it.

Or there is the weird phenomenon of flash mobs. People agree by text message or tweet to assemble in one place and, suddenly, do so. This was originally intended as a joke or art piece designed to demonstrate sheep-like conformity, but it rapidly became an aspect of cultish libertarianism. It doesn't work. Flash mobs in Russia are simply prevented by cutting off mobile-phone coverage. Old-world politics is more powerful than the web.

Wait, because Russian police cut off mobile phone coverage to stop a flash mob, the whole concept of flash mobs is dead? Again, I'm having trouble seeing how that makes any sense.

And, finally, the everything-free, massively deflationary effects of the web may be over. Rupert Murdoch, head of The Sunday Times's parent company, has said he is thinking of charging for online versions of his papers. The hard fact that somebody, somehow, has to pay for all this is breaking into web heaven.

I like how just the fact that Murdoch is thinking about charging for the news means that the "deflationary effects of the web may be over." Got any data to back that up? Or doesn't the professional press do that sort of thing? Finally, we've already dispensed with the myth that the news isn't paid for. You would think that such a professional would know that subscriptions have almost never paid for the news. Far be it from us, the mere individualistic, cultish amateurs, to actually look at the actual data and point out that subscriptions have almost never even covered the cost of printing and delivery. Journalism has always been paid for by advertising, and just because the content is free online, it doesn't mean that it hasn't been paid for.

I doubt Mr. Appleyard will read this. After all, the web is full of such dangers, and any attempt to correct his factual errors is obviously coming from just another individualistic cultist who cannot think for himself.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Frank sez, "I know you're asking for trouble wearing a ski mask inside a bank. Now, my town [Ed: Westerville, OH] is prohibiting wearing hats, hoodies, sun glasses and also the use of cell phones inside banks. When will the insanity end?"

Westerville police have asked the city's 21 banks and credit unions to post window signs that direct customers to put away cell phones and remove sunglasses, hoods and hats.

The idea is to weed out those who want to conceal their identities from security cameras to rob the bank or credit union.

No hat, no hood, no shades? Come on in (Thanks, Frank)

Guitar amp housed inside of a Magic 8-Ball.

J. K.'s Page [via Dinosaurs and Robots]

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Electronics | Digg this!

Craigslist has fired back at South Carolina Attorney General Henry McMaster in an open letter defending the company's policies and procedures surrounding the much debated "adult services." Stating not only the measures that have been taken to minimize illegal behavior, CEO Jim Buckmaster suggests that Craigslist is doing much better at minimizing questionable ads than other major competitors like Yahoo!, Google, and others. "Mr McMaster, I strongly recommend you reconsider and retract your remarks, and positively affirm that you have no intention of launching criminal investigations aimed at any of these upstanding companies, because in truth none of them are deserving of such treatment. [...] We're willing to accept our share of criticism, but wrongfully accusing craigslist of criminal misconduct is simply beyond the pale. We would very much appreciate an apology at your very earliest convenience. As I'm sure would all of the other fine companies whose executives you've called out as criminals."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

You may recall last November that a bunch of movie studios got together and sued Australian ISP iiNet, for not being able to wave a magic wand and make all unauthorized file sharing among its users disappear. The ISP, who has taken a very pro-consumer stance, responded by noting that if there's any "theft" involved, it should be a matter for the police to investigate, not an ISP to take action based on allegations alone:

They send us a list of IP addresses and say 'this IP address was involved in a breach on this date'. We look at that say 'well what do you want us to do with this? We can't release the person's details to you on the basis of an allegation and we can't go and kick the customer off on the basis of an allegation from someone else'. So we say 'you are alleging the person has broken the law; we're passing it to the police. Let them deal with it'.

In March, the company further explained its defense, noting that direct file sharing between two individuals doesn't appear to violate Australian copyright laws, since there's no "public" distribution of the material.

The latest, as pointed out by Michael Scott, is that the studios are basically stomping their feet and demanding that iiNet admit that it broke copyright law.

To be honest, it appears the two sides are talking past one another. The studios insist that iiNet is breaking the law by not taking action against file sharers, while iiNet is pointing out that's not the issue. It's saying it would be perfectly happy to take action against those convicted in a court of violating the law. But it can't just take the ISP's word for it, and so it sees no reason to act until a court has convicted someone.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

talk like a pilot day
pilot #1
pilot phrases
pilot #2
how to talk like a pilot
pilot #3

Permalink for this edition. Web Zen is created and curated by Frank Davis, and re-posted here on Boing Boing with his kind permission. Web Zen Home and Archives, Store, Twitter. (Thanks Frank!)

Recently on Boing Boing Video...

* "TO." An ambient animated short by filmmaker Bob Jaroc and the band Plaid (Warp Records). Best enjoyed with stereophonic supersonic headphones, so you can appreciate the shift from one channel to another, while you watch thousands of starlings take flight in a burnt sunset sky. (DOWNLOAD / YOUTUBE)

---

* "SEBASTIAN'S VOODOO." We revisit a beautiful animated work by UCLA student Joaquin Baldwin, which we first featured on our daily video program about a year ago. It's up for an award at Cannes! Vote for it! (DOWNLOAD)

---

"$5 COVER." Director Craig Brewer (Hustle and Flow , Black Snake Moan) talks to us about his latest project: the MTV online series $5 Cover, which chronicles the internet-age lives and dreams of struggling musicians in Memphis, Tennessee. (DOWNLOAD / YOUTUBE)

---

RSS feed for new episodes here, YouTube channel here, subscribe on iTunes here. Get Twitter updates every time there's a new ep by following @boingboingvideo, and here are blog post archives for Boing Boing Video. (Special thanks to Boing Boing's video hosting partner Episodic).

ryanguill writes "Wired has an article about expanding your five (maybe six) senses to allow you to sense other things such as direction. It also talks about hijacking other senses to compensate for missing senses, such as using electrodes in your mouth to compensate for lack of eyesight. Another example is a subject wearing a belt with 13 vibrating pads. The pad pointing north would vibrate giving you a sense of direction no matter your orientation: '"It was slightly strange at first," Wächter says, "though on the bike, it was great." He started to become more aware of the peregrinations he had to make while trying to reach a destination. "I finally understood just how much roads actually wind," he says. He learned to deal with the stares he got in the library, his belt humming like a distant chain saw. Deep into the experiment, Wächter says, "I suddenly realized that my perception had shifted. I had some kind of internal map of the city in my head. I could always find my way home. Eventually, I felt I couldn't get lost, even in a completely new place."""

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Over at Gawker, Foster writes:

[A]longside Robert Draper's GQ piece on Donald Rumsfeld being called out by former colleagues, they're running covers of his White House morning defense briefings. You have to see these.

Draper notes that the briefings were "a daily digest of critical military intelligence so classified that it circulated among only a handful of Pentagon leaders and the president; Rumsfeld himself often delivered it, by hand, to the White House." You have to wonder: was Rumsfeld sitting over a well-to-do Department of Defense intern, going through loads of pictures and trying to decide what colors he wanted which quotes to be? Or did he do it himself?

Donald Rumsfeld's Judgment-Happy, Scary, Biblical Defense Briefing Art (Gawker, thanks Richard Metzger)

One of the robotics groups we're going to have at Maker Faire this year is the Jesuit High School Robotics team, from Sacramento, CA. They'll be showing off their underwater ROVs. Here's a teaser vid they did.

Jesuit High School Robotics

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Education | Digg this!

Don't forget, the last day to buy advance (discounted) tickets for Maker Faire is THIS Wednesday, Midnight, PDT, May 20th. Tickets purchased after the advance deadline will be at regular price, same as at the gate. This also applies to group rate tickets.

Tickets can be purchased online and at locations around the Bay Area.

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Announcements | Digg this!

Here's my first cigar box guitar. The frets are crooked, the action is too high (because I forgot that I needed to shave off the part of the neck that's glued to the box), the sound hole cuts into the neck, the neck is split, I shouldn't have used pine for the neck because it will bow, the fret dots aren't centered. And yet it works! I have already started making CBG #2.

If you are interested in making one of your own, I recommend Bill Jehle's excellent DVD: How to Build a Guitar: the String Stick Box Method, and joining Cigar Box Nation, a social network of cigar box guitar makers.

My first cigar box guitar

I'm going to speak at Foro Internet Meeting Point in Asturias this June. Here's a brief interview. (Thanks, Miguel!)

With Craigslist caving on how it manages its "adult" ads, we've noted that some politicians are still angry, despite having been a part of the group that bought into the agreement Craigslist made with them six months ago. However, since this really has everything to do with two AGs who are running for governor of their states, rather than any real attempt to stop any illegal activity, they have to keep grandstanding. Henry McMaster, AG of South Carolina (and candidate for governor) has been among the worst, threatening to file criminal charges against Craigslist management to put them in jail. Of course, even the most basic legal analysis shows that McMaster has absolutely no case -- and, in fact, the "deadline" that McMaster put in place last Friday came and went without McMaster actually doing anything.

However, he's still talking a big game -- and it looks like Craigslist has had enough of letting him get away with blaming them for everything. The company's CEO, Jim Buckmaster, has taken to the Craigslist blog to ask why they're being targeted when various newspapers in South Carolina have many more such "questionable" ads that are often a lot more explicit and graphic than those on Craigslist. The post lists out a variety of South Carolina newspapers and how many adult ads they have, noting that McMaster doesn't seem to be going after any of them and threatening to throw their execs in jail. Following that, he put up a separate post asking for a retraction and an apology from McMaster for his misguided accusations.

Meanwhile, the folks over at Digg are making a really good point. If grandstanding politicians are going to blame Craigslist for those murders in Boston where the killer used Craigslist to find victims, how come now one is yelling "blame AOL!" after a woman was killed by a guy she met via AOL instant messenger. In this day and age, it's quite depressing that people in positions of authority still seem to think the tool is to blame, rather than the individuals who use them.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Michael J. Ross writes "Content management systems (CMSs) are created largely by Web developers using back-end programming languages (such as PHP, by far the most common choice). The free CMSs are built as open source projects, by volunteers who have many demands on their time. As a result of both of these competing factors, far less time is devoted to the front-end aspects of these CMSs. In turn, the "themes" that define the appearance of a CMS-based website are typically substandard, in the eyes of many Web designers and, most likely, countless users of those sites. This criticism has been leveled even against Drupal, although the situation is improving. A new book, Front End Drupal: Designing, Theming, Scripting, is intended to help Drupal designers everywhere speed up that process of improvement." Read on for the rest of Michael's review.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A wonderful remix produced by Lindsay, aka waambat, who studies electronic media at the University of South Florida. She did an equally awesome Muppet remix of Peaches' "Fuck the Pain Away." (Thanks, Susannah Breslin!)

I know nothing about the Internet Identity Workshop 2009 except that their logo made me laugh aloud.

8th Internet Identity Workshop (via Making Light)

You haven't tried everything to get your kids to study until you've tried the Study Ball. The Study Ball is a 21-pound prison-style device that locks onto your children's leg and only unlocks after a predetermined amount of study time has passed. The homework manacles can't be locked for more than four hours, and come with a safety key. The product website states, "Quite often, students who are having problems concentrating tend to get up every ten minutes to watch TV, talk on the phone, take something out of the fridge, and a long list of other distractions. Were they to dedicate all this wasted time to studying, they would optimise their performance and have more free time available. Study Ball helps you study more and more efficiently." Stop Teasing Your Brother Pepper Spray coming soon.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A French fossil expert believes he's solved one of the great mysteries of science -- the question of why Neanderthals disappeared. His theory? Humans ate them.

The controversial suggestion follows publication of a study in the Journal of Anthropological Sciences about a Neanderthal jawbone apparently butchered by modern humans. Now the leader of the research team says he believes the flesh had been eaten by humans, while its teeth may have been used to make a necklace.

Fernando Rozzi, of Paris's Centre National de la Récherche Scientifique, said the jawbone had probably been cut into to remove flesh, including the tongue. Crucially, the butchery was similar to that used by humans to cut up deer carcass in the early Stone Age.

"Neanderthals met a violent end at our hands and in some cases we ate them," Rozzi said.

The idea will provoke considerable opposition from scientists who believe Neanderthals disappeared for reasons that did not involve violence.

How Neanderthals met a grisly fate: devoured by humans (Guardian UK, photo via Wikipedia)

Our pal Iowahawk went to a swap meet and picked up a pair of 3D glasses from the 1939 World's Fair. They were given out to attendees so they could watch Chrysler's whimsical stop motion movie (above) that shows a car being assembled by invisible workers. The glasses prompted Iowahawk to do a little digging into Chrysler's exhibition at the World's Fair, and he found a number of interesting images, which he shares on his blog.

What a show it must have been -- a Rocket Port of Tomorrow, a Talking Car, a Frozen Forest, all manner of Engineering Wonders, plus the aforementioned 3-D movie extraganza. Still something strikes me in this ephemera as very melacholy. In 1939 The US was going through a 10th straight year of economic depression (national unemployment was still 17%) and by September, WWII was underway; a stark contrast with the shiny optimism reflected these (kinda) rose colored glass. If any car company in 1939 had reason to be skittish about futurism it was Chrysler, which had recently taken a major financial bath on the too-far-ahead-of-its-time Airflow; and yet they seem pretty bullish on the whole thing here. It's hard to imagine this kind of optimisitic boosterism at Chrysler today. Belvidere itself home to a half-empty Chrysler assembly plant, which I passed on the way to the swap meet. Whether Chrysler can survive as a zombie mutant financial partnership between the Federal government and Italian industrialists, it certainly won't share DNA with the company who staged this production.

1939 World's Fair Chrysler 3D movie

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "Noted singer songwriter Billy Bragg has written an excellent column in The Guardian, coming out against the pro-RIAA '3-strikes' legislation the big 4 record labels are trying to push through. In the article, entitled 'Do we want ISPs penalizing our fans?', Bragg writes: 'Having failed miserably in previous attempts to stamp out illicit filesharing, the record industry has now joined forces with other entertainment lobby groups to demand that the government takes action to protect their business model.' He goes on: 'Fearful of the prospect of dragging their customers though the courts, with all the attendant costs and bad publicity, members of the record industry have come up with a simple, cost-free solution to their problem: get the ISPs to do their dirty work for them. They are asking the government to force the ISPs to cut off the broadband connection of customers who persistently download unauthorized material, without any recourse to appeal in the courts.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "Noted singer songwriter Billy Bragg has written an excellent column in The Guardian, coming out against the pro-RIAA '3-strikes' legislation the big 4 record labels are trying to push through. In the article, entitled 'Do we want ISP's penalizing our fans?', Bragg writes: 'Having failed miserably in previous attempts to stamp out illicit filesharing, the record industry has now joined forces with other entertainment lobby groups to demand that the government takes action to protect their business model.' He goes on: 'Fearful of the prospect of dragging their customers though the courts, with all the attendant costs and bad publicity, members of the record industry have come up with a simple, cost-free solution to their problem: get the ISPs to do their dirty work for them. They are asking the government to force the ISPs to cut off the broadband connection of customers who persistently download unauthorized material, without any recourse to appeal in the courts.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

MAKE magazine is giving away PDFs of the projects I demoed on The Martha Stewart Show today. Grab 'em while they're hot!

In the Lori Drew case, she was convicted for "computer hacking" because she violated MySpace's terms of service by setting up a profile of a fake person. And for this, she deserves years in jail? Well, if that's the case, reader Roni Evron wants to know if some police officers are going to face the same charges after they set up a fake Facebook profile in order to bust up an after-prom high school party. Apparently, they set up a fake Facebook profile and friended a bunch of the kids at school, who apparently were "cavalier about accepting people into their network of friends." That, of course, is fine... but it's basically the same thing that Drew was arrested and convicted of doing.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Frequent Slashdot contributor Bennett Haselton writes "A woman sued Yahoo because they wouldn't remove a page created by her ex-boyfriend pretending to be her and soliciting strangers for sex. What would be an effective system for large companies like Yahoo to handle 'impostor' complaints, without getting bogged down by phony complaints and unrelated disputes? This is a harder problem than it seems because of the several possible cases that have to be considered. One possible solution is given here." Read on for Bennett's analysis.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Gowanus Studio Space is holding a contest for the best Jell-O Mold:

Jell-O is the perfect medium for design in these times of restraint given its versatility, economy, and availability. This is why it’s time for a comeback of the Jell-O proportions of old: soaring heights, strange colors, object suspension!

The Gowanus Studio Space’s Jell-O Mold Competition will pit designers against each other in an effort to make the Jell-O mold cool again. Competitors will battle it out for mold supremacy in the following categories:

• Creativity
• Aesthetics
• Structural/sculptural ingenuity
• Edibility/culinary appeal
• Best use and showcase of Jell-O

A crack panel of respected judges will announce the winners at 8pm on the day of the event. The judging and awards ceremony will be held at the Gowanus Studio Space in Brooklyn.   

The deadline for entries is June 12, with a registration fee of $15/$10 for students.

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Events | Digg this!

Rudy woke up earlier than I did this morning, so he started blogging before I had a chance to introduce him!

I met Rudy Rucker around 1987 when he gave a reading at a High Frontiers Monthly Forum meeting in Berkeley, California. Rudy read from his novel Wetware and brought along an unfolded tesseract that he'd made from cardboard and tape. I told him that his 1984 novel, Master of Space and Time, reminded me a little of Fredric Brown's The Mind Thing, he said that was an interesting observation.

We've stayed in touch over the years, and he has contributed to a number of projects I've been involved with, including Wired, HardWired, bOING bOING, and Boing Boing. (His daughter Georgia designed The Happy Mutant Handbook, too!)

As always, it's a thrill to again have Rudy contribute to Boing Boing. Here's his intro post:

For me, Mark Frauenfelder has always been like a Good Elf, the kind that helps the needy woodcutter in the fairy tales. He’s reliably into whatever I’m up to, which is a rare joy.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s Mark and Carla Sinclair published some of my essays and columns in their printzine bOING bOING. In 2000, when Mark told me he was starting a blog, and that he planned to make a living from it, I thought he was­--shall we say overly optimistic?

I had no concept of how big blogging would get. And before long the Good Elf had converted me. He lured me in for a month’s stint as a BoingBoing guest blogger in August, 2004. (Bitrot seems to have corrupted and partially eaten my archive on BoingBoing, but I providently saved a version of it online here .)

I’d just retired from teaching and programming in 2004, and I liked having a new way to kill time. When I was done blogging for Boing, I didn’t want to stop, so a month later, I started my Rudy’s Blog, which has now accumulated about six hundred posts and three hundred thousand words by me­--which is the length of three or four of my novels.

Not that I would have written more novels if I hadn’t been blogging. Blogging actually promotes my novel writing, rather than hindering it. I can try out new ideas in public on the blog, and sometimes my readers give my useful comments.

Okay, a few bio facts. I’m a writer and a mathematician who worked for twenty years as a Silicon Valley computer science professor. I’m best known as a science-fiction novelist, and I received the Philip K. Dick award twice. My thirty published books include both novels and non-fiction books. My most recent pair of SF novels, Postsingular and Hylozoic, describe a near-future Earth in which every object becomes conscious.

For more info about me, you can go here.

I’m looking forward to blogging on BoingBoing for the next two weeks!

theodp writes "Newly-disclosed USPTO documents show that Microsoft is seeking patent protection for a 'Magic Wand', a device with various gizmos and sensors that can manipulate and interact with its environment, including video and holographic images, while using biometrics to connect with the user. 'Even the most pragmatic individual,' explains Microsoft, 'would have trouble arguing against the merits or utility of, say, a magic wand that actually worked to control or communicate with objects or components in an associated nearby environment.' No doubt. The inventors include CXO/CTO J Allard, and Sr. Researcher Andy Wilson."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

We recently wrote about a trial where there were concerns that a jury member was sending Twitter messages during the trial, but that's nothing compared to text messaging while on the witness stand. Yes, apparently a guy who was being questioned as a witness, used a break in the action (as the judge spoke to the lawyers in the case) to text message with his boss, who was also in the court room and at the plaintiff table. After being alerted to this by a "courtroom spectator," the judge declared a mistrial:

"Let me be really frank about this," the judge said. "I never had this happen before. This is completely outrageous, absolutely outrageous."

Toledano responded, "It was on a break."

Silverman shot back: "It doesn't matter. You are communicating about the case and the subject matter of the case with a witness who is currently under oath and before the jury,"

Toledano said, "I'm sorry, after we took the break, it's not in the middle."

The judge explained himself again.

"It's a problem on your communicating with the witness about his testimony whether it's before the break, after the break and during the break while he's testifying," he said. "This is outrageous."

These stories of technology in the courtroom seem to be coming up more and more frequently. It seems as though very few people have really thought through the implications of the many channels of communication that every individual now has with them, and how that changes common assumptions about how people can and will communicate, even in "constrained" areas.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Mike says: "A disturbingly detailed model of the Battle of Stalingrad."

An anonymous reader writes "Astronauts John Grunsfield and Andrew Feustel began the fifth and final spacewalk of their Hubble Space Telescope repair mission this morning at 8:20AM. During their spacewalk the two will install the second battery group replacement in an equipment bay above the Wide Field Camera 2 and next to the compartment where the first battery set was installed on the second spacewalk. Each of the battery module weighs 460 pounds and contains three batteries. The batteries provide electrical power to support Hubble's operations during the night when there's no sun to power the solar arrays."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

(Rudy Rucker is a guestblogger. His latest novel, Hylozoic, describes a postsingular world in which everything is alive.)

I love gnarly shapes and processes---gnarly in the sense of being not too orderly and not too random, right on the living border. Moving water is amazing stuff, and cranking your camera's shutter speed up high lets you freeze it. And your foot, every now and then you look at it and---how strange. Really, we're as oddly shaped as any fabulous jungle plant or deep ocean crustacean.

A few years ago, I gave a talk called "Seek the Gnarl" where I talked about how gnarliness relates to the way a writer creates the plot for a novel.

I used to maintain that it was better not to plot my novels in advance. I'd defend the practice of not having a precise outline by speaking in terms of the gnarl. A characteristic feature of any complex process is that you can't look at what's going on today and immediately deduce what will be happening in a few weeks. It's necessary to have the world run step-by-step through the intervening ticks of time. Gnarly processes are unpredictable; they don't allow for short-cuts. In other words, the last chapter of a novel with a gnarly plot is, even in principle, unpredictable from the contents of the first chapter. You have to write the whole novel in order to discover what happens in the last chapter.

This said, I've learned to at least try to write an outline to try and lessen the pain of writing. But even with an outline, I can't be quite sure about the twists and turns my story will take. How precise, after all, is an outline? If, as William Burroughs used to say, a novel is but a map of a territory, an outline is but a map of a map. In the end, only the novel itself is the perfect outline of the novel. Only the territory itself can be the perfect map.

I took this photo on Shattuck Avenue in Berkeley the other day. I like the contrast between the digital numbers labeling the billboard, and the gnarly tatters of the peeling paper. The numbers are the outline, the (actually quite elegant) shapes of the paper are the novel.

I'm not saying a novel should be a random mess. I'm saying that it's nice if the story has the organic and unpredictable feel of some living thing that's grown or of some natural shape that's arisen over time. The characters and tropes and social situations bounce off each other like eddies in a turbulent wakes, like vines twisting around each other in a jungle, like the plates of a skull.

Online version of Rudy's talk, "Seek the Gnarl".

John Szwalla, 17, of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, attempted to rob an Internet cafe with a concealed banana he said was a gun. From the Associated Press:

The owner, Bobby Ray Mabe, said he and a customer jumped Szwalla, holding him until deputies arrived. While they waited, Mabe says the teen ate the banana.

Mabe says deputies took pictures of the peel. Forsyth County Sheriff's office spokesman Maj. Brad Stanley says deputies joked about charging Szwalla with destroying evidence.

"Deputies: Banana used as gun in holdup, then eaten"

You've been very patient and waited longer than you should have for another game to come from Japan that manages to both capture and captivate with all the sublime high-weirdness that made Katamari Damacy the cult hit it's become, and again it's come from Namco, and it's for the Wii, and that game is: Muscle March (above). Elsewhere we saw Guru Meditation, the first Atari 2600/iPhone cross-platform game, which asks you, simply, to meditate as quietly and as still as possible, J.J. Abrams' Star Trek recreated in The Sims, the first footage of Id's Wolfenstein as an iPhone RPG, and new levels for the google-maps enhanced PlayStation 3 downloadable The Last Guy. We also got the first glimpse at Tony Hawk's latest Ride and its literal skate-deck controller, a half-baked Solid Snake custom toy, a program to create your own glitched-out NES art, and illustrator/children's book illustrator J.otto Seibold apparently prepping a secret videogame project.

A bunch of people have been submitting an opinion piece from the Washington Post, that is basically one of the most stunning set of suggestions for what Congress could do to "save" newspapers. If I didn't know any better, I'd think it was satire, because the suggestions are so mind-bogglingly bad and dangerous, it's hard to believe anyone wrote it with serious intent. Also, it's worth noting that the Washington Post didn't bother to detail the rather massive conflicts of interests from both lawyers. Apparently they both have represented numerous big name newspapers. And what is it that these big newspaper journalists keep telling us about how it's the "blogs" that hide conflict of interests? Anyway, let's dive in to the meat of the argument:

The Internet innovators that have thrived online enabled their own success as early as 1996 by securing immunity from defamation and other liability caused by user postings on their sites. Two years later, they persuaded Congress to add another exemption, this one for user postings that violate copyright law. These safe harbors have allowed companies from Yahoo to YouTube to prosper from the content they carry with little concern of being held accountable for it.

First, it's rather troubling that two lawyers could so fundamentally misunderstand the safe harbor rules put into both the CDA and the DMCA. The claim that it was the internet companies that somehow sought out these rules is laughable and ignores the history of both laws in question. Both the CDA and the DMCA where massive extensions of laws that purposely limited internet communications massively. The two safe harbor provisions were tiny incursions into both laws designed to (reasonably) point out what should have been obvious: if someone breaks the law, the liability should be on the person who broke the law and not on the tool or service used to do so. That's called common sense. These safe harbors weren't, as implied by these lawyers, some massive gift to internet companies. They were a small "safe harbor" for internet companies worried about these two massive laws that criminalized a tremendous amount of communication, showing that the liability should fall on the actual party, rather than on the tool.

Bring copyright laws into the age of the search engine. Taking a portion of a copyrighted work can be protected under the "fair use" doctrine. But the kind of fair use in news reports, academics and the arts -- republishing a quote to comment on it, for example -- is not what search engines practice when they crawl the Web and ingest everything in their path.

Publishers should not have to choose between protecting their copyrights and shunning the search-engine databases that map the Internet. Journalism therefore needs a bright line imposed by statute: that the taking of entire Web pages by search engines, which is what powers their search functions, is not fair use but infringement.

That would be a massive reinterpretation of copyright law, and would effectively destroy much of what makes the internet useful. This proposal would make it illegal to index the web. It would outlaw search engines. Yes, for the sake of saving some outdated newspaper businesses, these lawyers wish to make it so that before a search engine can index any website, it needs to negotiate permission. This would kill the internet.

Federalize the "hot news" doctrine. This doctrine protects against types of poaching that copyright might not cover -- the stealing of information not by direct copying but simply by taking the guts of the content. While the Internet has made news vulnerable to pilfering because of the ease of linking from one site to the next, the hot-news doctrine has limited use because it is only recognized in a few states.

Now that many news aggregator sites have taken "linksploitation" to a commercial level by selling ads wrapped around the links they post, Congress has the incentive it needs to pass a federal law protecting hot news. Such a law would give publishers an additional source of legal leverage outside of copyright to demand fair compensation for the content they create.

The "hot news" doctrine, considered by many to be one of the worst legal decisions ever made when it comes to intellectual property needs to be reversed, not federalized. It is the one case in the US where "facts" can be considered protected information, and that's bad for everyone. Suggesting an expansion of the hot news doctrine shows a fundamental misunderstanding of First Amendment rights, copyright, the internet and communications.

Eliminate ownership restrictions. Media insolvency is a greater threat today than media concentration. Congress should abolish caps on ownership of broadcast stations and bars on newspaper and television ownership in the same market. These outdated rules belong to an era when the Web was a home for spiders.

The above suggestion might be the only one in all of this that makes any sense. Of course, when combined with the other suggestions, it becomes a horrible idea. These lawyers would effectively kill off all forms of competition to newspapers... and then let the big news organizations combine? Why?

Use tax policy to promote the press. Washington state is taking a lead in the current crisis with legislation signed into law this week to slash business taxes on the press by 40 percent. Congress could provide incentives for placing ads with content creators (not with Craigslist) and allowances for immediate write-offs (rather than capitalization) for all expenses related to news production.

We've already discussed how silly Washington state's new rule is, but are these lawyers really saying that Congress should specifically pick winners and losers in the online classifieds space? How does that not offend the basic concepts of what Congress is supposed to do? How could two lawyers suggest this with a straight face?

Grant an antitrust exemption. Congress first came to journalism's defense with antitrust relief in 1970, when it permitted endangered newspapers to combine their business operations without fear of antitrust suits if their newsrooms remained independent.

So because newspapers are too clueless to survive, they need to be granted monopoly rights? Sorry, don't buy it. The whole thing is stunning in just how brazen it is in basically stating that (a) newspapers are more important than all of the internet and (b) just kill off that pesky internet and everything will be fine. Usually, when industries try to work on regulatory capture (getting regulators to put in place laws that favor them) they at least try to couch it in language that pretends it's for the public good. To outright suggest killing off the internet in favor of newspapers is incredibly shameless.

In responding to this, Jeff Jarvis highlighted a comment made by Dale Harrison that's worth repeating:

A lesson worth remembering is at the turn of the 20th century people had a transportation problem... and the solution turned out not to be a "faster horse"... but a Ford.

And one should note that the Ford didn't arise out of the "Horse Industry Revitalization Act".

I think the future of the media business will look as different as Ford and Toyota's operations look from horse traders and blacksmiths.

Imagine what the passage of such ill-conceived legislation would have done to the car industry a century ago.

It would have strangled the nascent auto industry at birth, postponing its inevitable rise while sheltering a dying industry, only postponing its inevitable demise... doing great damage to both. Newspapers need to be encouraged to adapt to the future, not retreat behind legislative walls hoping the future will go away.

The newspaper industry's troubles go to the very core of their historical business model.

What's historically given value to editorial content is the relative scarcity of distribution versus readers. Newspapers have enjoyed natural localized economic monopolies that allowed each of them to exercise monopoly control over the amount of content (and advertising) they allowed into their local marketplaces.

Monopoly constraint of distribution and supply will always lead to prices (and profits) significantly above open market rates. Newspapers then built costly organizational structures commensurate with that stream of monopoly profits (think AT&T in the 1970's).

The dynamics of content replication and distribution on the Internet destroys this artificial constraint of distribution and re-aligns advertising (and subscription) prices back down to competitive open market rates. The often heard complaint of Internet ad rates being "too low" is inverted... the real issue is that traditional ad rates have been artificially boosted for enough decades for participants to assume this represents the long-term norm.

An individual reader now has access to essentially an infinite amount of content on any given topic or story. All those silos of isolated editorial content have been dumped into the giant Internet bucket. Once there, any given piece of content can be infinitely replicated and re-distributed to thousands of sites at zero marginal costs. This breaks the back of old media's monopoly control of distribution and supply.

The core problem for the newspapers is that in a world of infinite supply, the ability to monetize the value in any piece of editorial content will be driven to zero... infinite supply pushes price levels to zero!

What this implies is that no one can marshal enough market power to monetize the value of content in the face of such an infinite supply and such massively fragmented distribution. Pay-walls, lawsuits and ill conceived legislation won't allow the monopoly conditions to be re-constructed.

There are certainly ways to make online news profitable... and many of us are working to develop such approaches... but I can assure you they don't involve inventing a "faster horse"...

Indeed. It's time to stop having Congress keep passing laws that stop innovation in hopes that legacy industries magically come up with faster horses.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Lucas123 writes "The Personal Genome Project, which opened itself up to the public on April 25, has to date signed up 13,000 of the target 100,000 volunteers needed to create the world's first publicly accessible genome database. Volunteers will go through a battery of written tests and then offer DNA samples from which their genetic code will be derived and then published to help scientists discover links between genes and hereditary traits. While the Personal Genome Project won't publish names, just about everything else will be made public, including photos and complete medical histories. Scientists hope to some day have millions of genomes in the database."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The NYT has an in-depth look at the pop-psych training that bill collectors are getting, using profile data sucked out of card histories to figure out how to get inside debtors' heads and get them to cough up money they can't afford. This is driven by the long-term strategy of offering cards to poor credit risks on the grounds that they'd be apt to get into debt and cough up huge amounts in interest payment, unlike well-heeled yuppies who pay every bill on time.

The exploration into cardholders' minds hit a breakthrough in 2002, when J. P. Martin, a math-loving executive at Canadian Tire, decided to analyze almost every piece of information his company had collected from credit-card transactions the previous year. Canadian Tire's stores sold electronics, sporting equipment, kitchen supplies and automotive goods and issued a credit card that could be used almost anywhere. Martin could often see precisely what cardholders were purchasing, and he discovered that the brands we buy are the windows into our souls -- or at least into our willingness to make good on our debts. His data indicated, for instance, that people who bought cheap, generic automotive oil were much more likely to miss a credit-card payment than someone who got the expensive, name-brand stuff. People who bought carbon-monoxide monitors for their homes or those little felt pads that stop chair legs from scratching the floor almost never missed payments. Anyone who purchased a chrome-skull car accessory or a "Mega Thruster Exhaust System" was pretty likely to miss paying his bill eventually...

To see how one company transforms thousands of low-paid employees into telephone psychiatrists, I attended a day of Bank of America's four-week training program at the company's Delaware offices. (I was allowed to attend on the condition that I neither identify nor interview the trainees during the course.) At the front of the classroom, a poster explained the company's "Customer Delight Model." The trainees were supposed to "provide a delightful opening," "employ delightful words," "acknowledge and empathize" and "personalize with a POWER close." They spent the morning discussing hypothetical cases, like a cardholder with twins whose husband announced he had fallen in love with another woman. He handed over divorce papers, had a moving truck outside and in short order took over the house and left the cardholder with two kids, only $400 a week and a ton of credit-card debt.

What Does Your Credit-Card Company Know About You?

See this lovely photo of the Space Shuttle Atlantis much much larger over at Boing Boing Gadgets. Trust me, it's worth it.
"Space is the Place"

Hugh Pickens writes "Fox News reports that "Vice President Joe Biden, well-known for his verbal gaffes, may have finally outdone himself, divulging potentially classified information meant to save the life of a sitting vice president." According to the report, while recently attending the Gridiron Club dinner in Washington, an annual event where powerful politicians and media elite get a chance to cozy up to one another, Biden told his dinnermates about the existence of a secret bunker under the old US Naval Observatory, which is now the home of the vice president. Although earlier reports had placed the Vice-Presidential hide-out in a highly secure complex of buildings inside Raven Rock Mountain near Blue Ridge Summit, Pennsylvania, Fox News reports that the Naval Observatory bunker is believed to be the secure, undisclosed location former Vice President Dick Cheney remained under protection in secret after the 9/11 attacks. According to the report, Biden "said a young naval officer giving him a tour of the residence showed him the hideaway, which is behind a massive steel door secured by an elaborate lock with a narrow connecting hallway lined with shelves filled with communications equipment." According to Eleanor Clift, Newsweek magazine's Washington contributing editor "the officer explained that when Cheney was in lock down, this was where his most trusted aides were stationed, an image that Biden conveyed in a way that suggested we shouldn't be surprised that the policies that emerged were off the wall." In December 2002, neighbors complained of loud construction work being done at the Naval Observatory, which has been used as a residence by vice presidents since 1974. The upset neighbors were sent a letter by the observatory's superintendent, calling the work "sensitive in nature" and "classified" and that it was urgent it be completed on a highly accelerated schedule."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Aaron ALAI's EMF detector project looked so simple and fun I had to give it a try. After putting it together, I liked it so much that I went and built a more 'meter-like' version using an LED bargraph -

Arduino code is available here.

As I mention in the vid, I was a bit concerned the wire probe might be affected by the LEDs I mounted nearby -- but from what I can tell, it still seems (relatively) accurate. A short walk around my workspace even revealed a few items I'd forgotten were plugged in - helpful! I'm sure there are many ways in which this project could be used/repurposed/modded - I plan on converting the readings to sound when I get the chance. If you make one be sure to submit a pic to the Flickr pool and/or send us a link.

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Arduino | Digg this!

Ever feel that the web configuration interface for your wireless access point didn't give you the control you desired? Why not just connect a keyboard and monitor directly to the router and bypass having to access it from another device? That's what Sven Killig has done with this clever hack using a DisplayLink device and some open source know-how.

Plug a monitor into your Linux based router [via reddit]

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Wireless | Digg this!

davidmwilliams writes "Those of us who work in technology have a jargon all of our very own. We know the difference between CPUs and GPUs, between SSD and HD, let alone HD and SDTV! Yet, our users are flat out calling everything 'the hard drive.' Why is it so?" As much as I hate to admit it, this particular thing drives me nuts. You don't call the auto shop and tell them that your engine is broken when your radio breaks!

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Cirtcele built a synth sequencer module using a dekatron vacuum tube display -

The clock circuit includes a relay which clacks away somewhat charmingly. The relay noise does not get into the sound path of the synth, it is just the noise the synth makes whilst operating. Sound is recorded over the camera's microphone so you all can enjoy 60 seconds of clack clack clack clack clack.

And in case that weren't enough tube-goodness for ya - the synth it's sequencing is tube based as well. [via DeviantSynth]

More:

Dekatron timer brings vintage tube tech to the kitchen

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Electronics | Digg this!

We've seen it over and over again -- when people have access to large databases of information, it's almost impossible for them to resist the temptation to abuse the info. The latest example comes via Michael Scott, who points us to the news that the Insurance Corporation of B.C. (ICBC) was caught checking its own database to examine the claim histories of potential jurors in a trial in which the company was involved. Not surprisingly, this is a massive breach of Canadian privacy laws and also raises questions about the jury itself. The judge in the case is now trying to find out if ICBC has done this in other cases as well. ICBC seems to be bending over backwards to say this won't happen again and that it's put in place safeguards, but it's not clear why it happened in the first place.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Barence writes "Mozilla Labs has launched a design competition that aims to find an alternative to tabbed browsing. "Tabs worked well on slow machines on a thin internet, where ten browser sessions were 'many browser sessions'," Mozilla claims on its Design Challenge website. "Today, 20+ parallel sessions are quite common; the browser is more of an operating system than a data display application; we use it to manage the web as a shared hard drive. However, if you have more than seven or eight tabs open they become pretty much useless." Aza Raskin, the head of user experience at Mozilla Labs, has already blogged on the possibility of moving tabs down the side of the browser, with tabs grouped by the type of activity involved (i.e. applications, work spaces)."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

MAKE contributor Cy Tymony got a nice little write-up in the Daily Breeze, talking about his book, Sneaky Green Uses for Everyday Things:

"I try to look at every little thing people throw away and say, `What can we do with it?"' said Tymony, 53, of Torrance. "The good thing is, spare parts are everywhere.

'(The book) is about being resourceful,' said Tymony, who has his own gadget watch (he never wears it to the airport) complete with hidden match heads, a rudimentary fishing rod, a flashlight and about 20 other emergency items. 'When you're resourceful, you will find out how much power you have that's latent.'

For Tymony, who works full time as a computer support technician for the Federal Aviation Administration and has in the past worked as an auto mechanic, a TV repairman and a computer technician, the ideas never stop.

'I'm always thinking,' he said. 'The idea is to never throw things away.'"

Author Cy Tymony has ideas for recycled items

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Green | Digg this!

From the MAKE Flickr pool

Rotormind puts a new spin on a classic concept -

The Micro Rhythm Orchestra is an update on the venerable music box tradition. I made it from a wooden cigar box and head-park solenoids scavenged from old disk drives. The solenoids are controlled by a microprocessor. Instead of playing a conventional melody, the solenoids are sequenced to click in rhythmic patterns. If the whole business wasn't quite such a dorkfest, the sound could almost be considered funky.

Do give a listen to the sound samples over on the project page - they're quite awesome.

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Electronics | Digg this!

An anonymous reader writes "Every now and then a new- or old-media journalist tries to explain to everyone why Linux is not yet ready for the desktop. However all those men who graduated from their engineering universities years ago have only superficial knowledge about operating systems and their inner works. An unknown author from Russia has decided to draw up a list of technical reasons and limitations hampering Linux domination on the desktop." Some of the gripes listed here really resonate with me, having just moved to an early version of Ubuntu 9.10 on my main testing-stuff laptop; it's frustrating especially that while many seemingly more esoteric things work perfectly, sound now works only in part, and even that partial success took some fiddling.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Justin Blinder, a student at Parsons, created this plushie doll that clings to you and snoozes, like a living critter:

Snoozy the Sloth is a plush toy with a respiratory system. He sleeps while clinging onto a user, allowing them to feel both the contraction and expansion of his chest, as well exhaling of air from his mouth. The main concept behind snoozy is to create an intimate, yet passive, toy interaction that relaxes and comforts a user, through the tactile experience of steady breathing patterns.

Snoozy the Sloth

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Kids | Digg this!

Anti-piracy groups often have a way with massively stretching the truth when it comes to copyright law and anyone they dislike. The Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN apparently put out a wholly misleading article entitled: "You do not pay for it, it's unlawful." This line was taken from MPAA propaganda that has been sent around to public schools -- but, of course, it is wrong. There are tons of things that you don't pay for that are perfect lawful. To make matters worse, the article then accused a Dutch Usenet community called FTD of being "criminal." Knowing that it is not criminal, the group is now suing BREIN for falsely smearing its image by saying that it is criminal and for falsely portraying copyright law in the Netherlands.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

From the MAKE Flickr pool

• Press & hold functionality with Arduino

• Spare parts Enterprise boldy goes ...

• Styrofoam chandelier

• Ardiscofono from the MAKE Flickr pool

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Digg this!

Alan sez, "Charlie Skelton, reporting for the Guardian from outside the apparent location of this year's Bilderberg Conference [ed: s33kr1t high-powered meeting of financial leaders and politicos], has been intimidated out of the area and is still being hassled on the Athens subway - series of reports and photos of the goons, who are by turns terrifying and comically incompetent."

In comes the chief. Bossios Hoggios. "What the problem?" I tell him that I am being followed by the police, and that I would like it to stop, or be told the reason. "Why you here?" he barks. I tell him I am here for the Bilderberg conference at the Astir Palace. "Well, that is the reason! That is why! We are finished!" And he washes his hands of me, dismissing me with a gesture, striding back to his office. "Idiot," I mutter, unheard.

Back to the photograph.

"How you know he is a policeman?"

"I know that he is, I've seen him talking to your colleagues at the checkpoint."

"You are not allowed to take photos of policemen."

"So I am being followed by policemen?"

He gestures out of the window.

"Where is he now, this man you say following you? Show me him."

I'm standing in a police station. I don't know what to say. They tell me to ring the police if I see them again. To ring the police if I see the police following me.

Charlie Skelton's Bilderberg files (Thanks, Alan!)

Device Volume 1: Fantastic Contraption from the the Maker Shed celebrates the genius of invention and ingenuity with a showcase of works from an international roster of artists including--H.R. Giger, Ashley Wood, Stéphane Halleux, Viktor Koen, Christopher Conte, Gregory Brotherton, Mike Libby, Nemo Gould, and many others. Forward by our very own Senior Editor, Gareth Branwyn.

In the Maker Shed: Device Volume 1: Fantastic Contraption

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Maker Shed Store | Digg this!

When I first moved to Silicon Valley, the newspaper of record was the San Jose Mercury News. Everyone read it. It did a great job covering the local startup scene, and had some fantastic columnists and writers. But, one by one, those top notch writers left for greener pastures or to start their own things (such as Matt Marshall starting VentureBeat, which came out of the experimental Silicon Beat that he and Michael Bazely created while at the Merc). Then, of course, Knight Ridder came under all sorts of Wall St. pressure and got sold (and some of the papers then were quickly sold again). In the last few years, there's been fewer and fewer reasons to actually read the Merc, and I haven't looked at the paper (or the website) in probably a year or two. That's quite amazing since it used to be one of my first stops every morning. But, these days, all of the news that I used to get from the Merc can be found online from better sources with better writers. Back in March, I was on a panel discussion with a business editor from the Merc, and he and I got into a somewhat heated discussion on the wisdom of charging for news online. I told him that it made no sense, and he insisted that it could work. Apparently, he knew what was coming.

Media News, the current owner of the Merc, has announced that it's now going to start charging for online access to the paper, which seems like a move destined to fail dismally (and quickly). Already it's difficult to come up with any good reason to read the Merc online when it's free, and suddenly they want people to pay for it? All of the info that the paper provides is better provided elsewhere. It's difficult to see how they think that any significant number of people will actually pay to subscribe to the online version that's a tiny shell of what was once a great newspaper.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

An anonymous reader writes "'A controversial database which holds the details of every child in England has now become available for childcare professionals to access. The government says it will enable more co-ordinated services for children and ensure none slips through the net. 390,000 people will have access to the database, but will have gone through stringent security training.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes "We've discussed (at length) functional MRI technology as it pertains to marketing and virtual reality, but now Esquire writer A.J. Jacobs has become the first person to go inside the controversial machine to test the science behind his sex drive. As in, he has fMRI experts read his mind as to whether he's actually more turned on by his young wife or Angelina Jolie. The results, unsurprisingly, are both geeky and hilarious. Would you subject yourself to this kind of reality check?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Making a video and hoping not to get sued? Check out American University's Center for Social Media Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Online Video, now with video explanation:

American University's Center for Social Media and AU Washington College of Law's Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property, in collaboration with Stanford Law School's Fair Use Project, are launching a new video explaining how online video creators can make remixes, mashups, and other common online video genres with the knowledge that they are staying within copyright law.

The video, titled Remix Culture: Fair Use Is Your Friend , explains the Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Online Video , a first of its kind document--coordinated by AU professors Pat Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi--outlining what constitutes fair use in online video. The code was released July 2008.

"This video lets people know about the code, an essential creative tool, in the natural language of online video. The code protects this emerging zone from censorship and self-censorship," said Aufderheide, director of the Center for Social Media and a professor in AU's School of Communication. "Creators, online video providers, and copyright holders will be able to know when copying is stealing and when it's legal."

Fair Use and Online Video

Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Online Video

The UK may have deployed 14 CCTV cameras per red blood cell, but a meta-review of 44 studies on crime and CCTV find that ubiquitous surveillance is useful in late night parking lots, and that's about it.

The authors, who include Cambridge University criminologist, David Farrington, say while their results lend support for the continued use of CCTV, schemes should be far more narrowly targeted at reducing vehicle crime in car parks.

Results from a 2007 study in Cambridge which looked at the impact of 30 cameras in the city centre showed that they had no effect on crime but led to an increase in the reporting of assault, robbery and other violent crimes to the police...

The Campbell Collaboration report says that CCTV is now the single most heavily-funded crime prevention measure operating outside the criminal justice system and its rapid growth has come with a huge price tag. It adds that £170m was spent on CCTV schemes in town and city centres, car parks and residential areas between 1999 and 2001 alone. "Over the last decade, CCTV accounted for more than threequarters of total spending on crime prevention by the British Home Office," the report says.

The Lords report said that £500 million was spent in Britain on CCTV in the decade up to 2006, money which in the past would have gone on street lighting or neighbourhood crime prevention initiatives.

CCTV schemes in city and town centres have little effect on crime, says report

Here's a scan of the NYPD Operations Order "Investigation of Individuals Engaged In Suspicious Photography and Video Surveillance," a document issued last month by the Department telling cops in no uncertain terms to stop hassling photographers who shoot in public places, and to get a warrant before searching a camera. Good one to print and carry in the Big Apple.

"Photography and the videotaping of public places, buildings and structures are common activities within New York City . . . and is rarely unlawful," the NYPD operations order begins.

It acknowledges that the city is a terrorist target, but since it's a prominent "tourist destination, practically all such photography will have no connection to terrorism or unlawful conduct."

The department directive -- titled "Investigation of Individuals Engaged in Suspicious Photography and Video Surveillance" -- makes it clear that cops cannot "demand to view photographs taken by a person . . . or direct them to delete or destroy images" in a camera.

Operations Order Investigation of Individuals Engaged In Suspicious Photography and Video Surveillance

SHUTTERBUGGED (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)

Poster artist Dave Hunter (AKA Gammalyte) created this stunning concert poster for the Throbbing Gristle show in San Francisco last month. It has a wonderful '60s cartoon occult vibe to it. The seven color silkscreened print, approximately 20" x 26", is available in an edition of 250 for $50 each.
Throbbing Gristle SF poster

Sony has announced four new lenses to accompany its new Alpha models. Aimed squarely at the first-time DSLR owners it's done so much to attract, all feature inexpensive construction (including plastic mounts) and a new in-lens autofocus system designated SAM (which stands for Smooth Autofocus Motor). First up is a pair of new kit zooms (standard and telephoto), in the shape of the DT 18-55mm F3.5-5.6 SAM and the DT 55-200mm F4-5.6 SAM. These are accompanied by a pair of primes; the DT 50mm F1.8 SAM and the DT 30mm F2.8 macro SAM. Prototypes of all four lenses were first shown at PMA earlier this year.

Sony has announced three new entry-level DSLRs. The A230, A330 and A380 replace the Alpha 200, 300 and 350. The restyled cameras offer new ergonomics and easy-to-use interfaces, but retain the underlying specification of the predecessor models. As before, the basic model is a 10MP DSLR, the intermediate model adds Sony's fast live view system and the range-topping model gets a 14.2MP sensor. The new Alpha DSLRs are better differentiated from one another, with individual color schemes and grip finishes helping to distingush between the models.

Fashioning Technology posted this great project, from a couple of MIT students, that explores a new use for crowdsourcing:

Developed by Carnaven Chi, Xiao Xiao, Keywon Chung, and Peggy Chi, SOS: Stress Outsourced is a networked wearable system that allows users to send and receive massages anonymously. A new type of haptic social networking (or social therapy), SOS allows stressed individuals to send anonymous signals via the wearable to a global social network. In response, individuals within the network calm the stressed victim by sending them a "massage" stroke.

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Wearables | Digg this!

I screwed up and lost this week's Rebooting The News podcast.

This brief three-minute solo cast explains what happened and expresses apologies to Jay and everyone for this screwup.

Sorry!!

There is a whole herd of these cute little orphan robots in the MAKE Flickr pool.

The robots you see are adoptable for a fee. Or, in some cases we might be able to work out a trade. (I love art, but can't always afford to buy it...) Much of my work goes to a gallery in Pittsburgh called the Boxheart Gallery. You can get an idea of current pricing there. Thanks and enjoy the work!

Festive and nicely photographed!

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Arts | Digg this!

Hugh Pickens writes "The Guardian reports that a Neanderthal jawbone covered in cut marks similar to those left behind when flesh is stripped from deer provides crucial evidence that humans attacked Neanderthals, and sometimes killed them, bringing back their bodies to caves to eat or to use their skulls or teeth as trophies. 'For years, people have tried to hide away from the evidence of cannibalism, but I think we have to accept it took place,' says Fernando Rozzi, of Paris's Centre National de la Récherche Scientifique. According to Rozzi, a discovery at Les Rois in south-west France provides compelling support for that argument. Previous excavations revealed bones that were thought to be exclusively human. But Rozzi's team re-examined them and found one they concluded was Neanderthal." (Continued, below.)

Read more of this story at Slashdot.