cheezitmike writes "This week in Washington, DC, a group of Sci-Fi writers is helping the US Department of Homeland Security envision the future at the 2009 Homeland Security Science & Technology Stakeholders Conference. The agency is hoping the interaction between writers and bureaucrats helps the government 'break old habits of thought' and 'help managers think more broadly about projects and their potential reactions and unintended consequences.' And, it's at minimal expense to taxpayers, since the writers are consulting pro bono."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

There's been lots of buzz in Silicon Valley thanks to OpenTable having a 1999-style IPO, where the stock popped 70% on the first day (which, means that OpenTable effectively left a huge chunk of change on the table). But, of course, many people are asking if this finally means that IPOs can come back in fashion for venture-backed startups. Just a few weeks ago, we discussed how some believed that tech IPOs were primed to come back, though I was (and still am) skeptical. As the first link above shows, looking at OpenTable's financials makes you wonder how anyone would invest at the dollar value it hit. It makes little sense. So, this could just be an anomaly, as investors who have been sitting on cash for too long and are desperate to find different places to dump it got excited about a "new" tech IPO. But, unless the companies going public have better fundamentals, it seems like they'll start finding better places to put their cash. Instead, this seems like those sitting on too much cash venting a little steam just because.

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eldavojohn writes "We talked about Charlie Nesson of Harvard Law School before, and it may not have been known to you, but he is backing former student and Jammie Thomas' new lawyer, K.A.D. Camara. Ars is reporting that Nesson is upping the charges against the RIAA. Not only is file-sharing fair use, but the $100,000,000 the RIAA has collected through fear is due back to those wrongly accused. He's also increasing the number of fronts he's fighting. On Camara's website, he indicates that in another case, Brittany English (pro bono), they 'are asking the courts to declare that statutory damages like these — 150,000:1 — are unconstitutional and that the RIAA's campaign to extract settlements from individuals by the threat of such unconstitutional damages is itself unlawful, enjoin the RIAA's unlawful campaign, and order the RIAA to return the $100M+ that it obtained as a result of its unlawful campaign.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

[Photo from Connors934 on Flickr]

For this final installment of our Make: Green series, we look at a promising technology for generating electricity: wind turbines. A wind turbine consists of a propeller, a generator, and either an inverter or storage system. The propeller is essentially two or more airfoils attached to a hub. When the wind blows across the surfaces of the blade, it creates areas of low and high pressure, and this difference causes a change in movement. As the turbine turns, a generator attached to the hub on the prop turns a coil in a magnetic field. Moving magnets cause electricity to move through the wires of the generator, which moves through the circuit towards the electronics that regulate either the battery storage system or the inverter for grid-tied systems.

OtherPower, the cutting edge of low technology, is a great resource for information on wind energy and turbine building. They've been building and testing wind-harnessing systems for years, and recently published a book HowmeBrew Wind Power, to help people learn how to generate their own wind power.

If you want to roll your own wind-powered electricity, definitely check out the great resources at The Workshop, which has all kinds of useful documentation of experiments and ideas. Their energy pages are especially good. I like this one on experimenting with the blades from box fans.

Hull, Massachusetts, is one of the leaders in municipal wind power in the United States. The town has a long history of generating power from the wind that blows across the nearby waters. Volunteers in the town operate the Hull Wind website, archiving and distributing information about wind power generation.

[Image from The Back Shed]

If you have some spare stepper motors in your junk/parts pile, you might want to check out some of the stepper motor based generators. The Back Shed has a neat project idea that uses steppers to convert the wind energy to electricity.

There is a lot of energy in the wind. Power is the cube of speed, so a 40kmh wind has eight times the power of a 20kmh wind. As an example: a perfectly efficient windmill may produce 200 watts of power in a 20kmh breeze, 800 watts in a 40kmh wind, and 6400 watts in a 80kmh storm gust.

But what sort of windmills are we talking about? First up a few simple rules about windmills. Windmills behave in a way very similar to your average car engine. They have a power and torque curve, with different speeds for maximum power or torque. For electrical power generation, ideally, you need to operate your windmill in its peak power output.

1. More blades = less speed, less power, but more torque, perfect for pumping water.
2. Less blades = more speed.
3. Larger propeller diameter = less speed, but more power.

Shawn Frayne, author of one of the chapters in the Engineering the Future high school engineering text, developed a really clever way of generating electricity from the wind: the wind belt. Jason Striegel wrote about it here a few years ago. The video above points out some of the amazing possibilities.

---

You may also want to check out the other articles in our Make: Green series:

• Smart grids, smart metering, and Make: Green
• Home automation gear
• Electric cars and the smart grid
• Energy auditing for greater efficiency
• <a href="http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2009/05/harvesting_photons_with_solar_nets.html
• ">Catching photons with solar nets

For all of Make: Online's coverage of alternative technologies, check out our Make: Online Green archives.

---

Editor's Note: This post is part of a series of posts sponsored by GE. GE had nothing to do with the content of the article and no control over Make: Online editorial. -Gareth

digg_url = 'http://digg.com/environment/Making_electricity_out_of_thin_air';

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snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Paul Venezia takes VMware's purported 'cloud OS,' vSphere 4, for a test drive. The bottom line: 'VMware vSphere 4.0 touches on almost every aspect of managing a virtual infrastructure, from ESX host provisioning to virtual network management to backup and recovery of virtual machines. Time will tell whether these features are as solid as they need to be in this release, but their presence is a substantial step forward for virtual environments.' Among the features Venezia finds particularly worthwhile is vSphere's Fault Tolerance: 'In a nutshell, this allows you to run the same VM in tandem across two hardware nodes, but with only one instance actually visible to the network. You can think of it as OS-agnostic clustering. Should a hardware failure take out the primary instance, the secondary instance will assume normal operations instantly, without requiring a VMotion.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The MPAA's suit to block Real Networks' RealDVD software rolls on, with some twists and turns. The latest is that the MPAA says that about 10 years ago, Real made the same argument that the MPAA is making in this case, saying that there is no fair use exception to the DMCA. Real used the argument in a case against Streambox, which created software that let people record Real streams. It prevailed in the Streambox case, so the MPAA asked the judge for an estoppel ruling, which would preclude it from arguing for fair use in the current case, since the argument contradicts its earlier position. Closing arguments in the case have wrapped up, and there's no indication when the judge will issue a ruling -- nor whether Real's apparent change of heart on fair use and the DMCA will hamper its efforts.

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

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As part of the Tate Modern's forthcoming exhibition Pop Life: Art in a Material World, the London museum is recreating a 1992 performance/installation. Identical twins will sit for the entire exhibition, October 1, 2009 to January 17, 2010, below a pair of identical Hirst "spot" paintings. That's a long time, so the Tate Modern is seeking twins to sign up.
"Take Part In A Damien Hirst Performance"

We hear a lot about the dapper and prolific Jake von Slatt, but what about his arch-nemesis, Jake (of-all-Trades) Hildebrandt? He's apparently been locked away in his castle laboratory, hard at work on this amazing PC casemod, built as a promotional giveaway for CodeMaster's just-released Damnation PC/console game. Gorgeous work. I love the access ports hidden beneath the logo, the "saloon-door" style drive bays, and the plunger pull-start power-on, the construction of which he describes in the video).

Herr von Slatt must have steam blasting from cherry-red ears on the news. The gauntlet is down, von Slatt, the gauntlet is down.

Telecalculograph, Mk. II

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Etsy user WINDY54M sells toilet seats decorated with hand-carved leather. From his listing:

This is real vegetable tanned leather.I carved it in my shop at my workbench.Once carved it is then dyed/stained then a top finish is applied to seal it. Then I use adhesive to attach it the Oak toilet seat.Then I use real HEMP rope to decrotate the edge.

Hand Carved Leather Toilet Seats (Thanks, Tara McGinley!)

Andurin writes "With the launch of Data.gov, Sunlight Labs is offering $25,000 in prize money for developers who create apps that use newly-released federal government data. Data.gov is paving the way for citizens to become more engaged with their government, by providing for the first-time a clearinghouse of federal data in developer-friendly formats. The Apps for America 2 contest aims to find the best applications that rely on Data.gov, whether it be a client application, an iPhone app, or data visualization. Also, the first, second and third prize winners will receive airfare and hotel placement for a trip to Washington DC. While in Washington, DC, they'll attend an awards ceremony at the Gov2.0 Summit by O'Reilly Media and TechWeb."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

We've certainly talked a lot about the various ways that Trent Reznor has been exploring creative new business models that center around connecting with fans and giving them a reason to buy, but he's now using the same concepts to try to help save a life. On Wednesday, he announced a program to get people to donate money to help Eric De La Cruz get a heart transplant, whereby people who donate certain amounts to the cause will get to hang out/meet with Reznor and other band members during his ongoing tour involving both Nine Inch Nails and Jane's Addiction (which, by the way, hits Silicon Valley tonight, for those in the area -- though, they're not accepting any more donations for people going to tonight's show). As with the Ghosts I-IV model, there are different "tiers" of support available. In just two days, he's been able to raise nearly half a million dollars, once again showing the power of having a strong community and trying to do something good with it. It will be fascinating to see if there's more that can be done along these lines in the future as well -- turning some of these business models into helping out those in need.

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Realistic renditions of video game controllers (and other stuff) in bars of high-quality soap. Why not. #

superglaze writes "Jon von Tetzchner, Opera's CEO, has claimed that the open standards in HTML 5 will make it unnecessary to deliver rich media content using the proprietary Flash. '"You can do most things with web standards today," von Tetzchner said. "In some ways, you may say you don't need Flash." Von Tetzchner added that his comments were not about "killing" Flash. "I like Adobe — they're a nice company," he said. "I think Flash will be around for a very, very long time, but I think it's natural that web standards also evolve to be richer. You can then choose whether you'd like [to deliver rich media content] through web standards or whether you'd like to use Flash."'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

superglaze writes "Jon von Tetzchner, Opera's CEO, has claimed that the open standards in HTML 5 will make it unnecessary to deliver rich media content using the proprietary Flash. '"You can do most things with web standards today," von Tetzchner said. "In some ways, you may say you don't need Flash." Von Tetzchner added that his comments were not about "killing" Flash. "I like Adobe — they're a nice company," he said. "I think Flash will be around for a very, very long time, but I think it's natural that web standards also evolve to be richer. You can then choose whether you'd like [to deliver rich media content] through web standards or whether you'd like to use Flash."'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Registration is now open for CommunityOne West, June 1-3, 2009, San Francisco.

Get up to speed on dozens of free and open-source projects driving innovation in cloud computing, Web application development, social and collaborative technologies, and more.

The main conference on Monday, June 1, is free, but space is limited. Deep Dive tutorials on Tuesday, June 2, and Wednesday, June 3, require a fee.

Registration information is here.

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It's no secret that I think Jim Griffin's plan for Choruss -- to set up a licensing system for P2P -- isn't just grossly flawed, but dangerous in many ways. We discussed at length why the very idea of any sort of licensing (i.e., a "tax") on online music is a bad idea. We've also worried about the apparent bait-and-switch nature of the plan -- in that, while it would grant either "covenants not to sue" or (potentially) "licenses" for any file sharing you do, it wouldn't stop the recording industry from still trying to shut down file sharing apps as illegal.

A few months back, I finally met Jim and was still left with many, many questions about the program -- especially because I felt that when anyone tried to pin him down on any particular bad idea that's been associated with the project, he would cut off the discussion by saying, "we're just experimenting -- so just let us get data before you criticize." And this, in fact, is a part of the problem. Rather than discussing the merits of any particular idea, Griffin keeps suggesting that -- despite evidence, history or theories about how various license programs work -- none of that is relevant to discuss until he's got data on his particular experiment. The way the plan is structured is that different (as yet unnamed) universities and colleges will begin testing Choruss this fall -- and each university will set it up how they see fit, in order to get comparative data. Thus, some could make it compulsory. Some could make it voluntary. Some could charge a lot. Some could bundle it with something else. Some could charge a flat fee. Some could charge a per download fee. Some could charge a per listen fee. But, if you try to dig down into the problems with any of these, Griffin has just said, "well, we're just experimenting, and we don't know if it's a good idea or not." Unfortunately, this avoids allowing us to discuss the details of why the concept is troubling, because we're told repeatedly it's just an experiment.

Jim Griffin to answer questions

That said, in an email exchange, Griffin agreed that if we asked folks at Techdirt what questions they had about the program, he would answer them -- and I hope that we can get more detailed answers. Now, to say our email conversation has been without conflict would be incorrect, and there was a bit of a misunderstanding about the timing of us soliciting questions (I had hoped to do it as a part of The Free Summit, which he was scheduled to attend, but for perfectly legitimate reasons, he was unable to attend at the last minute). But Griffin says he wants to answer whatever questions we have, and I'd like to send him some good ones.

My own concerns

To kick it off though, I'm going to share an edited/updated version of the last email I sent Griffin, after he asked again why I was so against Choruss. In pitching Choruss, Griffin likes to tell the story of the founding of SACEM, the very first collective licensing society. He talks about how since restaurants benefited from the music, they should pay for that benefit -- and how that's the basis of every collection society since: any place/service that benefits from music should pay for that benefit. I have serious qualms about that thinking, and here's why:

My worries about Choruss come from a few different angles. I think any sort of collective/group licensing scheme involving such a third party is an economically inefficient, and unnecessary solution, that ends up doing more harm than good. I know you like to tell the story of SACEM. To me, that's a horror story. It's a story of how to create a system that leads to massive wasted resources, inefficiency, a reliance on a bad (but easy) business model, followed quite quickly by regulatory capture that leads to an ever increasing inefficiency. Look at what SACEM has resulted in, and all I see are massive inefficiencies. The idea of adding to that legacy concerns me. If you look at collections societies, over time they just keep trying to increase how much they collect, and will often lean on the government for help in doing so. The story of PRS in the UK is instructive here.

My concern is specifically that we're seeing other business models that are working tremendously well. I know you were unable to stay for my keynote in Nashville, but I went through examples of many different artists (small, medium and big) who were embracing new business models to tremendous success -- none of which relied on any sort of licensing proposal.

So, then, along comes a licensing plan where I need to pay (and, yes, I know this isn't determined yet and experiments will occur) say... $5/month for Choruss. Now suddenly that's $60/year that I'm paying for music (some of which gets siphoned off by the bureaucracy in the middle, even if it's a non-profit, just for administration) that relies on some magic formula to figure out who it goes to. I'm now less inclined to spend additional money directly with my favorite artists, because I've already spent the money via Choruss. My favorite artists get less money (and I'm reliant on your system to make sure that my favorite artists are actually rewarded). My money is spent less efficiently, and now there's a group in the middle who has every incentive in the world (even as a non-profit) to try to get an ever increasing part of the pie.

That just doesn't make sense to me.

You talk about the two issues: collecting a pool of money and distributing it efficiently. What's wrong with letting the market do that? People are giving money, gladly, to the artists who give them a reason to buy. That's your efficient collection and distribution system all in one. Except it doesn't need a middleman like Choruss.

The problem the recording industry faces isn't that there hasn't been an effective licensing system in the middle. It's that they weren't giving people a reason to buy. A licensing scheme isn't a reason to buy. It's a removal of a threat. That's negative value (we won't sue!), not positive value (here's additional scarce value you want to pay for). The artists I highlighted in my presentation were all giving positive reasons to buy. I'm afraid that focusing on a system like yours focuses on that negative reason to buy (you won't get sued!) rather than the positive reason (check out all the benefits I get).

That's my big concern.

That concern is exacerbated by the fact that every time a direct question is asked about how Choruss will work, your response is "it's just an experiment, so we don't know." I recognize that it is an experiment and you don't know all of the answers, but it feels very much like a dodge. I'm sure it's a fine line, because there are many details you don't know about, but you've been so vague about everything that it's hard to know what to think. A bunch of universities have agreed to it, but who are they? Why would they agree to test something without the details being clear? Who's setting up what those details are? In Nashville, you said some would involve all students, but at the SanFran Music Tech event you were saying they'd all be voluntary for the users. It just has this quantum feel to it. Any time anyone tries to get specific and warn about a certain aspect, you can just claim "well, we might not do that."

My biggest concern, frankly, is that putting in this inefficient, unnecessary bureaucracy in the middle, we take away resources from the new, more efficient, business models that are working. Both times I've seen you speak about Choruss, you've claimed that those business models won't necessarily be harmed, because they can still be built on top of Choruss -- but that goes against fundamental economics. If people have less money due to Choruss, they're a lot less likely to buy into these other business models.

Now, I'll be the first to admit that competing between business models is a good thing, but the very foundation upon which any sort of collective licensing system is built is to basically get everyone to opt-in, somehow or another -- and thus is set up to crowd out more efficient business models. Otherwise it just doesn't work. So you have every incentive to get third parties (universities, ISPs) to put in place policies that either force, or heavily incentivize, their students/subscribers to adopt a much more inefficient plan. The incentives are skewed. You and the universities/ISPs benefit -- but users (and musicians) do not.

So, with that, let's kick off some questions that I have as "starter" questions, and let's see what else you guys can come up with in the comments. Also, feel free to let me know which of the starter questions/user submitted questions you like best. Once we have a good bunch, I'll send them to Griffin and when we get his answers, I'll post them here. Some of these starter questions are the same ones I asked earlier this year, but I've added a few as well:

• Why do we even need such a plan when plenty of musicians are showing that they can craft business models on the open market that work?
• How does adding yet another middleman make the music market any more efficient?
• What's wrong with letting the market mechanism handle the collection and distribution of the funds directly between musicians and fans?
• Will the recording industry promise to stop trying to shut down file sharing systems if this program gets adopted?
• Will the recording industry promise to stop pushing for 3 strikes if this program gets adopted?
• How will the program prevent the gaming opportunities, where artists set up scripts to constantly reload/download their songs?
• Why should music be separated out and subsidized while other industries have to come up with their own business models?
• Why should those who don't listen to much music and aren't interested in giving their money to the recording industry be required to participate if their university or ISP decides to make them?
• Why should we have a business model focused on negative value (you don't get sued), rather than positive value (here's something scarce that's worth buying)?
• The history of collections societies shows that they only tend to expand, and try to capture more rents. Why would Choruss be different?
• If Choruss becomes big, won't lots of other industries want in? Movies will want their own version. Then newspapers. And if newspapers are getting their cut, then why not bloggers too? Or blog commenters? Or just any website? The road this leads down is a bad one, where we end up creating massive bureaucracies to subsidize every form of content, rather than focus on business models where those content providers have to provide a reason to buy their particular product. How do you prevent that?

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Hugh Pickens writes "Forbes reports on a new military-funded program aimed at leveraging an untapped resource: the population of geeky high school and college students in the US. The Cyber Challenge will create three new national competitions for high school and college students intended to foster a young generation of cybersecurity researchers. 'The contests will test skills applicable to both government and private industry: attacking and defending digital targets, stealing data, and tracing how others have stolen it. [...] The Department of Defense's Cyber Crime Center will expand its Digital Forensics Challenge, a program it has run since 2006, to include high school and college participants, tasking them with problems like tracing digital intrusions and reconstructing incomplete data sources. In the most controversial move, the SANS Institute, an independent organization, plans to organize the Network Attack Competition, which challenges students to find and exploit vulnerabilities in software, compromise enemy systems and steal data. Talented entrants may be recruited for cyber training camps planned for summer 2010, nonprofit camps run by the military and funded in part by private companies, or internships at agencies including the National Security Agency, the Department of Energy or Carnegie Mellon's Computer Emergency Response Team.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Students at Davenant Foundation School in Loughton, Essex, UK walked out of classrooms that had been equipped with CCTV cameras and refused to attend classes for three weeks until their civil liberties were respected. Students from the school are hashing over the issues in the comment area for the local news report, in incredibly intelligent, reasonable fashion. These kids give me hope for the future. I wonder if I can send Poesy there once she's old enough.

It meant they missed three weeks of studies and led to the drafting of a petition signed by about 150 of their peers.

A father, whose son took part in the walk-out, said the school was wrong not to consult parents about the use of technology which "threatened our children's civil liberties"...

Epping Forest MP Eleanor Laing, who has written to the school on behalf of concerned parents, and is due to meet the Information Commissioner to discuss the case, said: "We need to find out if the pupils are happy to be filmed but there are two valid sides to this argument, and I am trying to get to the bottom of it."

LOUGHTON: Pupils walk out of lessons in protest against Big Brother cameras (Thanks, @davidgerard!)

An incredibly lifelike advanced Obamabot is ready to be installed in the Walt Disney World Hall of Presidents. It's traditional for the current president's robot to give a little speech at the end of the show. Presumably, Obamabot will explain how the reasonable middle-ground demands suspending habeas corpus, covering up war crimes, and blocking the prosecution of participants in illegal wiretapping programs.

The Obama figure is the result of attention to minute details by Disney sculptors, animators, engineers and even anatomists who pored over presidential photographs and video of him and then drew on the latest advances in robotic technology.

Thus the audio-animatronic Obama purses its lips to pronounce its b's and p's in a way frighteningly evocative of the real one, and raises its hands, open-palmed, while shrugging its shoulders, in a way that can only be described as Obamaesque. Even the president's wedding ring, with its braided design, has been recreated.

Animatronic Obama Going to Disney World With High-Tech Style (Thanks, Eloisa!)

Former Fan of Palm writes to tell us that an enthusiastic, supportive developer community has fallen victim to corporate ineptitude once again. The preDevCamp started as a community-driven effort designed to mirror the iPhoneDevCamp based on the new "Pre" product announced by Palm. Unfortunately, suspicion and legal posturing seems to have gutted the founders of any and all enthusiasm they may have once had. When will corporations realize that community support is the best way to drive success? "As a corporation, I acknowledge that Palm's only responsibility is to its shareholders. There's nothing self serving or evil about that; it's how things work in big business. However there are many keen and willing developers out there, who have been waiting for the arrival of WebOS. A development platform is only a success if it is broadly adopted. Instead of embracing the grassroots upswell of interest in WebOS that preDevCamp fostered, Palm seem to be, at best, oblivious and, at worst, disdainful of the enthusiasm and good will engendered by these folk. I think they are missing a real opportunity to be involved in and to help generate the growth of a vital community."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Rachel Maddow points out that in Obama's national security speech yesterday, he proposes to replace Guantanamo-style detention without trial with his own detention without trial, a system he calls "Indefinite Preventative Detention" through which people who are believed to be likely to commit a crime at some point in the future can be locked up forever without charge, trial, jury or appeal.

Change I don't believe in.

Obama proposes Indefinite Preventive Detention without trial (Thanks, Zack!)

We were just talking about how there are more and more new startups in the market to help bands do everything they need to do to both make music and make money these days -- and one of the most successful has been ReverbNation, who has created a variety of tools for musicians to help them both distribute music and connect with fans in new and compelling ways. And, now, the company has announced that it not only wants to help bands give away DRM-free mp3 music for free, but it will pay some of them $0.50 per download. Who says free can't pay? Of course, as always, there is a money-making business model involved. In this case, it's that ReverbNation will get to include a small ad in the cover art that appears with the album. Also, it's only open to a 1,000 bands. I'm not convinced this is a sustainable model, as "ad supported" music strikes me as a market where it will be tough to get enough ad revenue to make it worthwhile -- but it's still a neat experiment to watch and see how it evolves. It certainly may help get more indie bands over the fear of putting their music out there for free on purpose -- and hopefully some of those bands will recognize the other benefits of doing so, beyond just the $0.50 per download from ReverbNation.

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oh-my-god sends word that the Swedish judge assigned to review whether the trial judge in the Pirate Bay trial was biased has now been removed — for bias. Here's a local news account in Swedish, which Google fails to translate. We've discussed the convolutions of this case on more than one occasion.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Steve sez, "Warning sign du jour: 'Do Not Board the Elevator with the Robot.'"

After finishing my doctoral work, I returned to Stanford Medical School to finish up the MD part of my MD/PhD. During one of my last clinical rotations, I stopped to take an elevator up to a surgical unit. While waiting for the elevator, a large washing-machine-sized robot--a unit that had then been recently introduced at Stanford Hospital to pick up and deliver x-ray films--pulled up along side me. After waiting patiently together, we both entered the elevator. As the door closed, the robot began to whir and then quite rapidly spun around 180 degrees to re-orient itself for exiting.

The large spinning robot nearly knocked me down in the elevator. It was somewhat frightening to be trapped in an elevator with little clearance for a massive spinning robot.

I recall being somewhat concerned about what might happen if a fragile patient, walking along with an intravenous pump, or a medical team with a patient on a gurney, entered the elevator with the robot.

Please Do Not Board the Elevator with the Robot

(Thanks, Steve!)

eldavojohn writes "Windows XP (and a lot of MS OS code before that) had a fundamental security flaw whereby the default setting made the ordinary user run as the superuser. Vista & Windows 7 have fixed that and implemented The Correct Paradigm. But what about the pre-Vista applications written to utilize superuser privileges? How do you migrate them forward? Well, running a virtualized instance of XP in Windows 7 is an option we've talked about. But Microsoft is pushing the idea of using 'shims,' which are a way to bypass or trick the code into thinking it's still running as user/superuser mode in Windows XP. This is an old trick that Microsoft has often employed, and it has brought the Windows kernel a long ways, in a duct-tape sort of fashion. At the TechEd conference in LA, Microsoft associate software architect Chris Jackson joked, 'If you walk too loudly down the hall near the [Windows] kernel developers, you'll break 20 to 30 apps.' So for you enterprise developers fretting about transitioning to Windows 7, shims are your suggested solution."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A survey that's useful for the people running the survey, but also makes the survey-taker chuckle along the way? Yep, this one. #

Following Craigslist's big announcement last week on the changes to how it handles "adult" ads, Andrew Cuomo angrily denounced the changes, claiming that several weeks before, "we informed Craigslist of an impending criminal case that implicated its website." It seems the details of that case have now become clear, as a prostitution ring that solely worked via Craigslist was busted by Cuomo. Yet, rather than recognize that the information on Craigslist allowed them to track down and arrest this crew, Cuomo is still lashing out at the site:

"Unless craigslist gets serious about putting real protections in place, it will continued to be an environment where criminal operations thrive with impunity,"

Does Andrew Cuomo even realize what he's saying? He's saying that they'll operate with impunity right after he showed that's not true by arresting them. Given the fact that Craigslist cooperates with the police (and one assumes it did in this case as well, given that Cuomo approached them about it "weeks ago"), then Craigslist actually helped the police catch these criminals. Does Cuomo blame AT&T after AT&T helps him get a wireptap in a criminal investigation? After all, AT&T provided the phone system, which allowed the criminal operations to thrive with impunity.

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Natalie Downe's ingenious use of CSS3 transforms in Webkit to build foldable, 8-page booklets from a sheet of A4 paper. #

"...the design uses a standard rubik's cube with stamps on four of its sides so that users can make their own typeface." Would love to get this in the hands of those wacky people who can solve a cube in 20 seconds. #

Recently on Offworld, One More Go columnist took a longer look at Jason Rohrer's famed five-minute memento mori art game Passage (above), to get "ammunition needed to convince yet another friendly, clever, skeptical non-gamer about the potential of the medium." We also saw the first stirring of an El Lissitzky-inspired grainy constructivist 2D platformer (!), found out that Left 4 Dead's Francis hates everything that everybody on Twitter hates, saw Street Fighter deconstructed, and spotted LucasArts vet/Double Fine founder Tim Schafer putting in another tour de force acting performance alongside Jack Black. Finally, we spotted Super Mario Bros 2 in horrible hyper-real life, watched a long preview of the upcoming labor struggles in Minotaur China Shop creators' next game, Crane Wars, and watched two brilliant short films made in 50x50 pixels, and saw the Famous Monsters of LittleBig-land.

French copyfighter Jeremie Zimmermann sez,

Folks from La Quadrature du Net (big up to Peter K!) have translated the French HADOPI law [ed: the new French copyright law, rammed through by Sarko over howls of public protest], which includes the absurd "three strikes" scheme [ed: if you are accused of infringement three times, you lose your Internet access -- no proof needed, no trial, no judge, no jury], bound to fail and utterly dangerous.

Curious archeo-legalists will enjoy its exotic stupidity, so impractical that everybody in France laughs at it with shame, including the members of Sarkozy's locked-down majority party who didn't dare to vote against it.

Pay particular attention to article 5 - subsection 3 where the "riposte graduee" is described, along with article 11 (obligation of "securing" one's internet access against it being used for counterfeiting, a complete technical nonsense that is the cornerstone of the whole thing).

Article 10 is also an incredible model of the worst you shall not write into the law if you want to prove that you understand what Internet is about, and how its growth and innovation worked so far:

"Art. L. 336-2. In the presence of infringement of a right of authorship or a similar right within the contents of a public on line communication service, the Superior Court, decreeing as required on the form of the hearing, may order at the request of the owners of protected works and objects, of the holders of their rights, of societies for the management of rights set forth in article L. 321-1 or professional organizations set forth in article L. 331-1, all measures needed to prevent or halt such damage to a right of authorship or a similar right, against any entity able to help remedy it. "

Enjoy it while it lasts, as it may soon be completely invalidated or neutralized by the Constitutional Court, or later on by the European courts... Yet Sarkozy's will of controlling the Internet doesn't seem to be stopped by such tiny details as constitutionality or rationality.

(please note that the translation is a work in progress that probably contains translation errors, with no legal value, and that only the original in French, blahblah, insert proper disclaimer here.)

HADOPI full translation (Thanks, JZ!)

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

I was happy to see a lot of response to my BoingBoing post of a few days ago, "Everything is Alive." Let me throw a little more fuel on the fire.

[A flowering plant eats a signpost!]

There's actually two different words we can play with here. "Hylozoism" is the doctrine that everything is alive, while "Panpsychism" is the belief that everything is conscious. These are close in meaning but not quite identical, although I'm comfortable with believing both.

Panpsychism is by no means a wacky new-age concept, it's been around since the dawn of philosophy. David Skrbina's fascinating study, Panpsychism in the West, (MIT Press, 2005) maps out the whole history. Here's a link to a page of Skrbina's book where he's discussing one of my favorite panpsychic philosophers, Gustav Theodor Fechner...more about him below.

One funny line from Skrbina, quoting the philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce: "what we call matter is not completely dead, but is merely mind hide-bound with habits."

In discussing hylozoism and panpsychism, we're not talking about the notion that the universe as a whole is alive and conscious. We're concerned with viewing individual object, even atoms, as being alive and conscious---although there's nothing wrong with adding on the quite reasonable belief that the universe as whole is alive as well.

Here's a short essay of mine called "Mind is a Universally Distributed Quality" which I wrote for John Brockman's annual Big Question page at his Edge site. The Big Question was, "What is your dangerous idea?"

[The Mad Professor cover art and design is by Georgia Rucker Design.]

A point discussed in Skrbina’s Panpsychism in the West is that if you’re not careful, advocating panpsychism becomes simply a matter of watering down your notion of "mind" to apply to objects. But, with Skrbina, I want to claim that it’s a real sensual mind that you’re talking about in that rock, that pen, that finger, that dust mote, that hair, that napkin torn in half (two minds now). A materialist might say, hah, there’s no content to such a claim, but I feel that I demonstrated how it really would feel to talk to objects in my science-fiction story, “Panpsychism Proved” which appeared in no less august a journal than Nature magazine. And to think they dared call me mad! Oh, by the way, my story also appears in my anthology, Mad Professor. Here's a free PDF of the story ---I put it online for you just now.

[Goosie the finger-puppet is alive.]

The scientist-philosopher Gustav Theodor Fechner was a fascinating guy. He liked to talk about the daylight view versus the nighttime view. In the daylight view of the world, everything is flooded with soul and life. In the nighttime view, the world is dead, dark, inhospitable, and we sentient and living beings are but tiny firefly sparks. Not too many of his books have been translated into English, but here's one of them that I found online, On Life After Death, from Google Books.

[This Big Sur tree is conscious.]

Finally, here's a quote from the philosopher William James's Pluralistic Universe online , describing Fechner's work:

For him the abstract lived in the concrete, and the hidden motive of all he did was to bring what he called the daylight view of the world into ever greater evidence, that daylight view being this, that the whole universe in its different spans and wave-lengths, exclusions and envelopments, is everywhere alive and conscious... The original sin, according to Fechner, of both our popular and our scientific thinking, is our inveterate habit of regarding the spiritual not as the rule but as an exception in the midst of nature. Instead of believing our life to be fed at the breasts of the greater life, our individuality to be sustained by the greater individuality, which must necessarily have more consciousness and more independence than all that it brings forth, we habitually treat whatever lies outside of our life as so much slag and ashes of life only; or if we believe in a Divine Spirit, we fancy him on the one side as bodiless, and nature as soulless on the other. What comfort, or peace, Fechner asks, can come from such a doctrine? The flowers wither at its breath, the stars turn into stone; our own body grows unworthy of our spirit and sinks to a tenement for carnal senses only. The book of nature turns into a volume on mechanics, in which whatever has life is treated as a sort of anomaly; a great chasm of separation yawns between us and all that is higher than ourselves; and God becomes a thin nest of abstractions.

newtley writes "Disgraced and discredited 'private investigator' MediaSentry, fired by former patrons Vivendi Universal, EMI, Warner Music, and Sony Music and their RIAA, may be dead and buried in America, but it's alive and well, resurfacing in Australia where it's once again plying its trade, probably under new management. 'I currently (but not for long) reside at a student dormitory... in Brisbane, Australia,' says a p2pnet reader, continuing: 'Yesterday I got called into the Managers office because the network manager had been contacted by MediaSentry and emailed one of the generic copyright infringement emails as a result of me downloading Angels and Demons. Now instead of studying for my exams and working on my final assignments I must take time to find a place to live before the 29th of May (2009).'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ole and Lena were laying in bed when the phone rang.

Ole answered.

"How should I know, that's over 2000 miles away!"

He slammed down the phone.

Lena says: "Who was that Ole?'"

Ole: "The hell if I know, some weirdo wants to know if the coast is clear."

Tim Hanlon writes "Biofuels continue to lead the field in the search for a renewable, environmentally friendly replacement for crude oil. Besides its use in the transport industry, crude oil is also used to produce conventional plastics and chemical products such as fertilizers and solvents. Now chemists have learned how to convert plant biomass directly into a chemical building block that can be used to produce not only fuel, but also plastics, polyester, and industrial chemicals, cheaply and efficiently."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

You had to know this was coming. With Chris Anderson's latest book, Free, coming out shortly, reviews are starting to pop up misinterpreting much of the book, and making bad assumptions that have nothing to do with the book at all. The key problem? People who are so confused by the title that they think "free" means "no business model at all." That seems to be the problem with James Ledbetter, who complains that Chris Anderson is a hypocrite for not making Wired Magazine free. Except... he does. It's free online for everyone to read. You pay for the scarcity -- the paper version (and even that is sold at a subsidized loss and made up by advertisers). If you understood the economic arguments in the book (i.e., free works really well for goods with a marginal cost of zero), then you wouldn't even bring up the issue of Wired charging for the paper magazine. Then there's an angry critique of Free in the New Statesmen, which starts out with a misguided attack on Anderson's last book, The Long Tail, using a single study (whose methodology had some issues) as support. In attacking "Free," the critic uses some guy who generated some computer models that insisted "free" doesn't work. Yes, computer models. With that, apparently, we can ignore reality. Perhaps the problem was with the computer models?

This isn't really a surprise, of course. When it was first announced that Chris was writing his book (which, contrary to the reviews above, is absolutely worth reading), I warned that by calling it "Free" people would, like moths to a lightbulb, focus entirely on the "free" part, and not the actual economic arguments behind it. Just as I had noted in the past that people seem to get screwed up by the concept of "zero," they also get screwed up by the concept of free. It would be an interesting brain scan study to do, but it seems that many people's brains run into something of a "divide by zero" calculator error when they encounter discussions of "free." They get stuck at the "free" part and fail to get beyond it to see how you use free as a part of a larger ecosystem and business model to increase the overall market potential.

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Instructables user eVolti made this small Stirling engine and used it to rotate a few LEDs. It's a very thorough tutorial, and I love the color mixing achieved in this photograph.

More:

How-To Tuesday: Teacup Stirling engine

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A 62-year-old man had a mental breakdown and ran off iafter grabbing several bottles of pills from his house. The cops asked Verizon to help trace the man using his cellphone, but Verizon refused, saying that they couldn't turn on his phone because he had an unpaid $20 bill. After an 11-hour search (during which time the sheriff's department was trying to figure out how to pay the bill), the man was found, unconscious.

Two K-9 units, several fire departments and 100 individuals on foot also were involved in the search for the man, who Sheriff Dale Williams said fled his residence on Kensington Rd. after a domestic disturbance call to deputies...

Williams said he attempted to use the man's cell phone signal to locate him, but the man was behind on his phone bill and the Verizon operator refused to connect the signal unless the sheriff's department agreed to pay the overdue bill. After some disagreement, Williams agreed to pay $20 on the phone bill in order to find the man. But deputies discovered the man just as Williams was preparing to make arrangements for the payment.

Unconscious Carroll man found after 11-hour search (via Consumerist)

Here ye, here ye, read all about it: San Mateo County Board of Supervisors declares last weekend in May as "Maker's Weekend."

Sayeth the press release:

At the center of Silicon Valley and the birthplace of the original garage start-up, San Mateo continues to be the hub of innovation, creativity, and fun. Representing this tradition is the geek-loving, gadget-happy, do it yourself (DIY) festival known as Maker Faire, happening on May 30th & 31st. Tickets for the event are selling fast, with geeks and makers from across the country (and even overseas) planning to attend. To welcome them, the San Mateo County Board of Supervisors has officially declared the weekend Maker's Weekend.

"I'm delighted that Maker Faire has chosen to return to San Mateo County and the Event Center. This will be a great weekend for all the creative folks of Northern California and those who visit," said San Mateo County Supervisor Carole Groom. "America has such a thirst right now for creative self-expression and there's an incredible need for out-of-the-box innovation. Maker Faire embodies the best of both these worlds in a way that's smart and fun. We couldn't be happier to welcome Maker Faire to San Mateo and to declare May 30th & 31st, Maker's Weekend."

At Maker Faire, technology meets art, science meets fashion, engineering meets crafting and that's just the tip of the iceberg. It's the world's largest DIY festival featuring cool robots, clever gadgets, backyard inventions, knitted wonders, renegade fashions, cars and bikes like you've never seen before, the occasional fireball, honey-making, a care repair center, clothes-swapping, music-making and much, much more!

Read ye the official Proclamation.

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Guanine writes in with a follow-up to our discussion a few months back on the SheevaPlug: 1.2-GHz ARM-compliant processor, 512 MB DDR2, 512 MB flash, USB 2.0, gigabit ethernet, in a package the size of a wall wart, for $99. Saul Hansell's Bits Blog in the NY Times talks about a few applications for such a device, whose price point Hansell claims will drop to $40 before too long. "The first plausible use for the plug computer is to attach one of these gizmos to a USB hard drive. Voila, you've got a network server. Cloud Engines, a startup, has in fact built a $99 plug computer called Pogoplug, that will let you share the files on your hard drive, not only in your home but also anywhere on the Internet. ... [Marvell's CEO said] 'Eventually you won't see the plug. We want this device to be in your TV, your stereo system, your DVD player.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

From the Humans since 1982 design studio comes the Clock Clock - using 24 analog timepieces to form one big digital. Hrrm ... the incredibly smooth hand movement, makes this one look a bit like a CG concept - even still, quite cool. A free font inspired by the piece is available on their site. [via Geekologie]

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As the current Space Shuttle mission (STS-125) comes to a close, the Shuttle is nearing the end of its functional life, its final mission slated for 2010. On a recent visit to Downey, CA, near Los Angeles, I had the chance to visit a series of buildings, now empty, that were the birthplace of the Shuttle, and before it, the Apollo spacecraft. In fact, it's the birthplace of the American aerospace industry. Today, these buildings bear the name Downey Studios because some of them are in use by moviemakers. Yet these still-standing hulks suggest the size and significance of what was once built there, and the echoes of engineers who lived out their careers there can still be heard. I met with members of Aerospace Legacy Foundation, headed by Gerry Blackburn, which exists in a few cluttered rooms on site. It's a home away from home for some of these retired engineers like Gerry, who worked here from the time he graduated high school until the plant, then owned by Boeing, closed in 1999. The foundation hopes to preserve the history of this site for future generations to learn how we made spaceships here.

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On Cool Tools, Zarko Vujovic talks about Ikea's adjunct to a tack-hammer, a free gizmo that does the trick:

I am an engineer, so I admire the way Ikea consistently uses a small set of fastening systems, all suitable for untrained labor. Ikea has even invented this tiny plastic device to protect customers from smashing their fingers with tack hammers.

A pinch of the clever friction-grips opens a small crevice in this utensil, and it neatly grips any small nail. Place it against a wall, tap the nailhead, and the nail goes in quite straight. Remove it and you are ready to safely hang a picture. The ergonomics are brilliant, the understanding of process is good, the operative results are excellent, and many innocent fingers go unsmashed. A real triumph of Swedish design!

Ikea Nail-Driving Utensil

An anonymous reader writes "Despite promising in January to open RTMP, Adobe has issued a DMCA take down request for an open source implementation of the protocol. The former SourceForge project page for rtmpdump now reports 'Invalid Project.' rtmpdump has been used in tools such as get_iplayer and get-flash-videos. Adobe is no stranger to the DMCA, having previously used it against Dmitry Sklyarov."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Earlier this year, we wrote about how the US's international copyright cops were complaining how people in other countries didn't like them very much. Specifically, they seemed shocked that other countries didn't necessarily agree with the US's view of copyright. Also, in that post, we had a quote from the US Chamber of Commerce, who was quite worried about "anti-IP activists" who were a "threat" rather than folks providing evidence of how excessive IP can do a lot more harm than good for industry. It's amazing that people providing evidence and data of how to build better businesses by adopting alternative models and trying to limit the damage done by excessive IP are considered a "threat."

Either way, it should come as little surprise that the Chamber of Commerce is now applauding the fact that Rep. Howard Berman (the Rep from Hollywood, who's never seen a copyright law he couldn't make more draconian) is trying to increase the number of US IP cops trolling the world trying to bully and cajole other countries into implementing more draconian copyright rules, no matter how much it goes against their own self interest. The details are hidden in The Foreign Relations Authorization Act because who could be against that, especially since it also authorizes funds for the Peace Corp?

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With so many older iPods gathering dust it's nice to see some of the very capable hardware being put to good use -

Widget and Hans stayed up til 2am hacking up some iPod sequencers at NYC Resistor. We are using pdPod on iPodLinux. You can hack your own iPods too, as part of the re-ware project, we are trying to make it easy: http://re-ware.org

This project was on hand for last night's Handmade Music event, busting mad mario beats throughout the night - good stuff. [via NYCResistor]

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Are you sick of blaring TV's? Wish you could do something about it?
Well you can with the this devious ultra-high-power version of the popular TV-B-Gone.
Watch the video to see it in action and pick up your own at the Maker Shed.
In the Maker Shed:


In the Maker Shed: Super TV-B-Gone kit
To download The Super TV-B-Gone MP4 click here or subscribe in iTunes.
Thanks to Mitch Altman for inventing this amazing gadget.

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eldavojohn writes "So you're an aspiring band and you haven't signed with a record label. Maybe you've got a fan base interested in purchasing your stuff but you're not really into accounting? Enter Amazon's partnership with TuneCore, a CD printing and music distribution service. You want to sell a full album on Amazon of you brushing your teeth? $31. And you get about 40% back on sales, so selling nine digital copies of your CD will put you back in the black. There you have it, public availability on one of the largest online commerce sites for $31 — no RIAA involved!" TuneCore's CEO put it this way: "As an artist, you have unlimited physical inventory, made on demand, with no [sic] upfront costs and worldwide distribution to anyone who orders it at Amazon.com."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

mikesd81 writes "Wired.com reports that you may not know it, but if you have a wireless router, a cordless phone, remote car-door opener, baby monitor or cellphone in your house, the FCC claims the right to enter your home without a warrant at any time of the day or night in order to inspect it. FCC spokesman David Fiske says 'Anything using RF energy — we have the right to inspect it to make sure it is not causing interference.' The FCC claims it derives its warrantless search power from the Communications Act of 1934, though the constitutionality of the claim has gone untested in the courts. 'It is a major stretch beyond case law to assert that authority with respect to a private home, which is at the heart of the Fourth Amendment's protection against unreasonable search and seizure,' says Electronic Frontier Foundation lawyer Lee Tien. 'When it is a private home and when you are talking about an over-powered Wi-Fi antenna — the idea they could just go in is honestly quite bizarre.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

From the MAKE Flickr pool

Matt outfitted his headgear with some quick-n-dirty AC -

I was bored one day at NYCR and started playing with my rising collections of motors.

Ended up stuffing an 18v motor into my bike helmet and putting two 9vs in series on it. Runs awesome. Surprisingly effective as a cooling apparatus and even more surprisingly effective as a fume buffer.

Probably not very safe in an accident though =P

Consider it an early prototype - fume buffering == quite welcome for urban usage. See the original photo on Flickr.

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I was out to dinner the other night with O'Reilly/MAKE's Brian Jepson, his wife Joan, and our new Make: Online author Kipp Bradford. We were talking about the awesome Thames & Kosmos science and tech kits we carry in the Maker Shed. The conversation inevitably turned to chemistry kits of yore, the beloved kits of our childhoods. Usually, I immediately go to my Gilbert sets, but this time, I flashed on a kit I'd largely forgotten about: The Johnny Horizon Environmental Test Kit. I think I was 14 when I got it.

I grew up in Chester, VA, the small town over from Hopewell, the "Chemical Capital of the South." On days when the wind blew out of the south, it was as if the Devil himself had farted on our sleepy little town. Armed with my Johnny Horizon Test Kit, I was determined to prove that Hopewell was hurting us. I did all of the tests in the kit -- suspended particles, wind-blown particles, Coliform, pH, smoke density, nylon deterioration, etc. I did them as a science project and showed that the industrial zone between Hopewell and Chester was crankin' crud into the air and water that was beyond allowable levels (in some tests). Nothing really ever came of it (except an A+ on the project), but it felt really empowering to get this kit, trudge off into the woods, and collect scientific data that actually painted a picture of what was happening in the surrounding area because of these plants. I still remember the canal that I went to next to one plant and how creepy it was -- everything was dead, choked with trash and the sulfurous reek of chemicals. It was like something out of a Troma sci-fi/horror film. Whenever I see that three-eyed fish on The Simpsons, I always think of Hopewell, Va, circa the mid-70s.

At the dinner, Brian asked if I'd ever thought to look up the Test Kit on the web. I'd looked up other kits, but not this one. As soon as I got home, I did, and found this page. Pleasant memories came flooding back (along with some unpleasant ones involving hellish flatulence).

(BTW: Hopewell, VA was thrust onto the national stage a few years later with the "Kepone disaster" of 1975, when workers at a plant that produced the pesticide Kepone got sick from over-exposure. Dozens of workers were affected, it costs many millions in clean-up, and fishing in the James River was shut down for years in the aftermath. One article I found online quoted the cardiologist who first linked the symptoms to the pesticide saying that this incident "really opened up awareness of how chemicals can affect the environment." I *tried* to tell them :-) Me and Johnny Horizon.)

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Last Friday, we had a great show with Ken Gracey of Parallax and Jeff Ledger of the Parallax forums, the fellow organizing the upcoming all-night Unofficial Propeller Expos. The first one, Expo West, is happening on June 27-28, 2009, at Parallax HQ, in Rocklin, CA. Expo North East is happening on August 22, in Norwalk, OH. We talked about Parallax, the Parallax Propeller chip, and the expos. Sounds like a lot of fun and we made Jeff promise to send us reports and pictures from the events.

This week, Friday, May 22, is our Maker Faire Special, with at least three guests who'll be presenting their work at the Faire: Cole Ingraham, the creator of The Pentachord, a type of "long string instrument," Noah Thorp, from the Bay Area Computer Music Technology Group, and Tito Jankowski, a "DIYbiologist."

We'll be giving away a few Faire tickets to callers, too! So, give us a call! The call-in number is (646) 915-8698.

Make: Talk on BlogTalkRadio

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Unofficial Propeller Expo

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There are plenty of places for people to make free VoIP calls through their PCs these days, while the cost of phone-based VoIP service keeps falling towards zero. Given this, it's a little surprising to see the companies behind some online video games and virtual worlds planning to start charging users to make in-game or in-world calls to other players and users. Apparently Second Life, Everquest and Star Wars Galaxies will soon feature paid calling plans, with the last two even letting "users talk with friends, no matter what Sony game they're playing." Wow, that's a great feature -- and one all those existing VoIP services already have, with the added benefit that they work when their friends aren't playing Sony games, too. So it's hard to imagine the benefits of integrated VoIP calls will justify their use over any of the free solutions for very many users. This sounds somewhat similar to the sort of thinking that was being tossed out by eBay when it bought Skype, talking about all the "synergies" between voice calls and eBay sales, and how the calls would be a huge boon to the company's bottom line. Those synergies, of course, never materialized for eBay. It seems likely they won't materialize for game and virtual world companies, either.

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

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Eric Stephenson Greg Pattillo is a beatboxing flautist (if you got it, flaut it), shown here performing a stirring rendition of the Super Mario theme.

beatboxing flute super mario brothers theme

tsamsoniw writes "The newly released Energy Star requirements for servers may not prove all too useful for companies shopping for the most energy-efficient machines on the market, InfoWorld reports. For starters, the spec only considers how much power a server consumes when it's idling, rather than gauging energy consumption at various levels of utilization. That's like focusing on how much gas a vehicle consumes at stop lights instead of when it's moving. Also, the spec doesn't care whether a server's processors have one core or multiple cores — even though multi-core servers deliver more work at fewer watts. Though this first version of Energy Star for servers isn't entirely without merit, the EPA needs to refine the spec to make it more meaningful."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I have to admit that, for all the insistence from movie industry folks about the importance of "windows" between releases in different formats, it's never made any sense to me that movies aren't released in multiple formats at the same time. In fact, I still can't figure out why the movie studios don't have DVDs of the movie you just saw for sale as you walk out of the theater. Offer up the DVDs with a discount if you have a ticket from the showing, and if the movie was really good, the DVD has lots of extras, and the price is reasonable, plenty of people would buy it right up -- rather than needing to remember months later. So consider me surprised and impressed that Fox made sure that the DVD for the latest season of the show 24 was available the day after the season ended. It's not quite the same as having DVDs of movies available, but it's close. Of course, the studio also decided not to do much marketing for the DVD release, fearing that people wouldn't watch the finale if they knew they could buy it on DVD the next day. Of course, they could also just record it with their DVR, but who's counting?

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Apple has rejected Eucalyptus, an ebook reader that facilitates downloading public domain books from Project Gutenberg, because some Victorian books mention sex (many of these same books can be bought as ebooks through the iPhone Kindle reader or purchased as audiobooks from the iTunes store). It's amazing to think that in 2009 a phone manufacturer wants to dictate which literature its customers should be allowed to download and read on their devices.

Thank you for submitting Eucalyptus -- classic books, to go. to the App Store. We've reviewed Eucalyptus -- classic books, to go. and determined that we cannot post this version of your iPhone application to the App Store because it contains inappropriate sexual content and is in violation of Section 3.3.12 from the iPhone SDK Agreement which states:

"Applications must not contain any obscene, pornographic, offensive or defamatory content or materials of any kind (text, graphics, images, photographs, etc.), or other content or materials that in Apple's reasonable judgement may be found objectionable by iPhone or iPod touch users."

Please view the attached screenshot for further information.

Remember, Apple is also petitioning the government to make it illegal to install any application on your phone that they haven't approved.

Whither Eucalyptus?

Jim Ottaviani's new science history graphic novel, T-Minus: The Race to the Moon, is a fast-paced, informative recounting of the events beginning with the launch of Sputnik, the first human-made satellite on Oct 4, 1957, to the first human landing on the moon on July 20, 1969.

I know Ottaviani's work through his much older book Dignifying Science: Stories About Women Scientists, which is one of my favorite comic history books, a vivid retelling of the lives of some of science's most inspiring women.

With T-Minus Ottaviani once again brings the human side of science to life, conveying the passion, the wonder, and the frustrations of the scientists and engineers who "fought" the space race on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Superbly researched, T-Minus never lets go of the story, but still finds many sneaky ways of inserting the hard data about the rockets, their capabilities, and the scientists who worked on them into the book.

Intended for young adults, this title was incredibly satisfying to me, an adult-adult (which is as it should be). I could also appreciate how a younger me would have revelled in the frequent sidebars giving diagrams and statistics for each rocket launched in the race, and both of us appreciated the lovely attention to the human details in the lives of the people in the story, like the cosmonaut whose father thinks "sitting on a rocket is no work for a grown man," the sheer wonder conveyed in the real-life words of the first people to do spacewalks, the Gulag-haunted Russian scientist Sergei Pavlovich's chronic (and eventually fatal) injuries from his prison term, and many other gracenotes.

As a history book or a diverting and inspiring story, T-Minus gets the job done.

T-Minus: The Race to the Moon

Adobe has released a release candidate of Photoshop Camera Raw 5.4 for immediate download from its Adobe Labs site. The latest version extends RAW support for 26 additional cameras and camera backs including the Canon EOS 500D, Nikon D5000, Olympus E-620 and 18 Hasselblad models. The 'Release Candidate' label indicates the update is tested, but not yet the finalized version.

The wonderful, historical, underfunded Bletchley Park site shows no sign of being funded as a public museum by the British Government. Bletchley was the site of the effort to crack Axis codes during WWII and is the birthplace of modern computing and cryptography. It is the nerd equivalent of the pyramids at Giza or Stonehenge, and it's falling apart.

"We have no plans at present to associate it with the Imperial War Museum," Lord Davies said. "The House is all too well aware of the significance of designating any area in association with a museum of that rank, but I want to give an assurance that Bletchley Park will continue to develop under the resources made available to it."

Bletchley Park, home to UK code-breakers such as Alan Turing is being preserved as a museum, but has been facing a funding crises of late. It was recently awarded around £600,000 by Milton Keynes Council and English Heritage, as well as a further £100,000 by IBM and PGP...

"My Lords, I declare an indirect interest in that my father was a beneficiary of the Ultra intelligence derived from the work done by the noble Baroness, Lady Trumpington, and others," the Viscount said. "To go a bit further than what other noble Lords have proposed, does the noble Lord not think that Bletchley Park should be turned into a full-scale national museum on the same terms as the Imperial War Museum or many of our other national museums?"

UK Snubs Support For Home of WWII Enigma (via /.)

hardsix writes "Despite the numerous films, books and plays, celebrating the brilliant achievements of the code-breakers at Bletchley Park, the UK government is still dragging its feet over providing proper support for the site. There has just been a debate in the House of Lords over whether the site should be given similar status to the UK's main WWII museum — the Imperial War Museum. But the government has brushed off the request, claiming that the site has received enough funding recently. However, as was shown by a visit to the site by UK actor, and Twitter-lover Stephen Fry, although devices such as Enigma have been restored many of the huts where the code-breaking work went on are in a bad state and more investment is needed."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Kevin Stapp writes in to highlight a simple fact that has been discussed time and time again: that if a newspaper locks up its content behind a paywall, it will lose a ton of traffic beyond just the regular readers who refuse to pay, because the sites that send you links (and traffic and new readers) will simply point elsewhere. As an example, Kevin points out that with Slashdot's post about Craigslist suing Henry McMaster, it initially had a paywall-blocked WSJ link... but quickly added a free link from another news source. This is a key point that old school newspaper folks keep forgetting. They think that their job is to deliver the news, and the readers' job is to read the news. But that's not the way it works anymore. These days, the community helps spread the news -- and by making that more difficult, you decrease your value to everyone, and make it more difficult for readers to help spread the news and promote your paper's coverage.

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Ask MAKE is a weekly column where we answer reader questions, like yours. Write them in to becky@makezine.com or drop us a line on Twitter. We can't wait to tackle your conundrums!

This week's question comes to us via CRAFT contributor Rachel Hobson. Her friend Kari is mother to a "true maker in the making." Kari writes:

Sam's birthday is a week from Sunday and I'm thinking of putting together a toolkit/box o' gadgets for him. Things to help him take stuff apart, things that he can do little experiments with, stuff like that. I'm thinking of a tiny screwdriver, electrical tape, maybe a hammer. He already has a tape measure. I don't know what else would be cool and fun and good for a seven-year-old. I want this to be the "big" item for him, a big toolbox with a bunch of wrapped things inside.

We passed this question around on the Make: Online Editors mailing list, and got a lot of neat suggestions. I'm sure these won't all fit for Sam's birthday, but at least its a jumping-off point!

• third hand tool with magnifying glass (for holding and inspecting stuff)
  
• small flashlight or head-mounted light
• needle-nose pliers
• gaffers tape (not as messy as duct tape)
• safety goggles
• wire cutters
• ruler or square
• multimeter
• Maker's Notebook (we'll toss that one in for free, happy birthday, Sam!)
• zip ties
• some junk to take apart (CD drive, old radio, etc.)
• wire nuts
• battery tester
• battery clips
• battery tester
• tire pressure gauge

If you have any suggestions for a seven year-old's first toolbox, please post them in the comments below!

Above image is cc-by-nc-sa by Flickr user Austin ampersand Zak.

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Filmmaker Robert Greenwald's documentary about sleazy unionbusting at Starbucks debuted the same day as Starbucks new Twitter campaign, so he hijacked the campaign to spread information about Starbucks' bad labor practices.

On a blog post published at the anti-Starbucks website Brave New Films created, people were encouraged to take pictures of themselves in front of Starbucks stores holding signs targeted at the company's "anti-labor practices." These users are then told to upload these photos onto Twitpic and tweet them out to their followers using the hashtags #top3percent and #starbucks. According to the post, these are the official hashtags that were designated by Starbucks itself for those who wanted to enter its contest. Within hours, several people had followed these guidelines and there were dozens of Twitpics in front of stores across the country.

As of this writing, the anti-Starbucks YouTube video has amassed over 30,000 views and was featured on the front page of social news site Digg. Greenwald said that Brave New Films is not done with its offensive against the coffee company, but he was hesitant to reveal his next steps.

Anti-Starbucks filmmakers hijack the coffee company's own Twitter marketing campaign (Thanks, Simon!)

Amazon's done a lot with its Web Services offerings to advance the notion of cloud computing, and it's now realized that the state of broadband in the US could do a lot to hold it back. Slow upload speeds could hamper the growth of cloud computing: Amazon's CTO says that to upload a terabyte of data over a 10Mbps connection would take 13 days. So the company is working around that issue by letting people submit data to Amazon Web Services via US Mail. Users send in a storage device with data they want added to the cloud, and when Amazon receives it, the data gets copied over and put online. It's not an ideal solution, but an interesting stopgap until fatter pipes proliferate. Perhaps there are some interesting business ideas here, like setting up local "cloud upload" stations with superfat connections, where companies could drop off their storage devices to have their data uploaded quickly. The issue of slow uploads could pose an obstacle to the wider uptake of cloud computing, and until it's overcome, there will be a necessity for these sorts of solutions.

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

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John Scalzi's run the inflation-adjusted box-office numbers for science fiction movies since 1931's Frankenstein and discovered that sf has always been in blockbuster territory:

On the Beach (1959)
One of earliest movies to use a science fiction premise (nuclear apolcalypse! Everybody dies!) without actually advertising itself as science fiction -- because Gregory Peck couldn't possibly be in a science fiction movie, you see. Be that as it may, not only was the picture lauded for its intelligent portrayal of people dealing with the end of life as we know it, it also brought in the equivalent of close to $140 million. It will be interesting to see if The Road, a similarly-themed post-apocalyptic flick also not advertising itself as science fiction, comes close to these numbers when it's released later this year.

Planet of the Apes and 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
Prior to Star Wars, this was science fiction's one-two punch at the box office, and it was a pretty hefty combination: Planet of the Apes, helped by the star power of Charlton Heston, brought in $32 million -- equivalent to $175 million today, and a sum no one would complain about. 2001, with its groundbreaking special effects and oh-so-serious weirdness, did even better: $56 million, or just over $300 million today, which would have put it at number four in last year's box office list, just below the latest Indiana Jones flick. The two movies in fact helped spur a series of largely dystopic, serious-minded science fiction flicks, such as Silent Running and Soylent Green (not to mention, in the case of Apes, a bunch of sequels).

John Scalzi - SciFi Movies Made Money Before Star Wars, Too

People outside of the UK might have missed the huge scandal over MPs' expenses -- basically, it turns out that Members of Parliament have been billing the public for all kinds of crazy things, including mortgages that they'd already paid off, maintenance on their moats (I shit you not) and pools, tampons (for male MPs), private security details, and so on. Most MPs have fallen over themselves to apologize for their unethical behavior.

Not Tory MP Anthony Steen.

Steen billed the taxpayer for maintenance of his 500-tree forest, upkeep of which was apparently necessary to the conducting of his duties at Parliament.

Steen says that constituents who resent their tax money going to pay for his forest are "just jealous."

After pondering the question of exactly why people were so angry over his claim for the treatment of 500 trees in the grounds of his house, he offered a succinct explanation today : "Jealousy".

Expenses row: MP who claimed for 500 trees accuses constituents of 'jealousy'

Instructables user FriendOfHumanity has a little HOWTO for installing a windowbox planter on the handlebars of your bike. I dunno, I'd be worried about doing a faceplant (worse yet, if you planted chickpeas, you might falafel your bike) (I did that once and I falafel about it).

Bicycle Window Box- For the transient gardener. (via Craft)

Jeremy Clarkson's review of the Honda Insight for the London Times made me grin, which is as close as I ever get to LOLing at something I read to myself.

The biggest problem, and it’s taken me a while to work this out, because all the other problems are so vast and so cancerous, is the gearbox. For reasons known only to itself, Honda has fitted the Insight with something called constantly variable transmission (CVT).

It doesn’t work. Put your foot down in a normal car and the revs climb in tandem with the speed. In a CVT car, the revs spool up quickly and then the speed rises to match them. It feels like the clutch is slipping. It feels horrid.

And the sound is worse. The Honda’s petrol engine is a much-shaved, built-for-economy, low-friction 1.3 that, at full chat, makes a noise worse than someone else’s crying baby on an airliner. It’s worse than the sound of your parachute failing to open. Really, to get an idea of how awful it is, you’d have to sit a dog on a ham slicer.

Honda Insight 1.3 IMA SE Hybrid

True Vox writes "My fiance and I have recently taken interest in City of Heroes (she's currently got a character on my account). She's got a cute little net book, but nothing nearly powerful enough for a 5-year-old MMORPG, let alone if we take interest in Champions Online! I am reticent to buy a new gaming computer simply for what amounts to a passing phase. Has anyone had any experience using one computer to control two monitors with two sets of input devices (e.g. two keyboards and two mice, or one keyboard, one mouse, and a 360 gamepad, perhaps). I have seen one solution that might work, but not much information from users that I can find. In short, does anyone have any experience with setups like this?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Last year, we noted two separate problems with trying to prosecute the guy accused of figuring out Sarah Palin's Yahoo email account password and posting it to the internet. First, the Justice Department has stood behind a position that opened emails are not private, based on a very literal reading of the law (you can check the link to understand the reasoning). Second, the law used to charge the guy specifically said that it was only a felony if it was used to further a criminal activity. That is, the hacking, by itself, wouldn't be seen as a crime unless it was a part of a larger criminal activity -- which it wasn't. Prosecutors changed the charges earlier this year to address that -- claiming that the criminal activity was a violation of Palin's privacy.

The accused guy, David Kernell, and his lawyers are trying a variety of different defenses (not surprisingly, of course), including claiming that Palin's privacy was not violated, because Palin's emails were a public record because (due to a separate lawsuit) a court had ruled that Palin was required to preserve her Yahoo account email. Because of this, the argument goes, the emails are part of the public record (which, given the first DOJ definition above, could fit under the DOJ's interpretation of the law). It's difficult to see this line of reasoning succeeding directly, as it seems to defy common sense, so it would be surprising if a judge bought into it.

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Over at the Quantified Self blog, Gary Wolf wrote a fascinating post about ex-Senator Bob Graham's 30-year-plus-habit of writing every aspect of his day-to-day life in little spiral notebooks. The press likes to make fun of his obsessive note taking (he's filled almost 4,000 to date), but it comes in handy:

The CIA claimed that Pelosi had been briefed in detail about the torture, and didn't make any objection until long afterward. Therefore, if there is to be any kind of sanction for torture, it should hit the top Democrat who approved it as well as members of the Republican administration who ordered it. Pelosi, though, denies having been briefed about the torture.

Well, it turns out that Bob Graham was also supposed to have been briefed on these topics, and the CIA forwarded to him the dates of the meetings he supposedly attended. But the CIA records were inaccurate, according to his own personal records. Such was the respect for Graham's notebooks, that this line of attack was closed within 48 hours.

This is interesting for several reasons. First, it's worth noting that one man's spiral bound notebooks were able to accumulate enough credibility to defeat the records of an organization whose very reason for existence is to collect information, communicate it to trusted members of government, and keep records of these communications. Anybody who has been following some of the controversy about patient records can add this strange example to their list of favorite anecdotes. Personal data, kept by a dedicated and interested party, even using yesterday's technology, will trump large scale collection systems managed by bureaucrats.

For some reason, it comforts me to think of the CIA as a bunch of bumblers.

Politican as self-tracker - Bob Graham's notebooks

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

There's an artwork by Chris Ofili in the San Franciso MOMA art museum just now. It includes a sequin-decorated ball of elephant dung, and stands on two more balls that rest on the floor. It's a pretty nice work.

A Frank Stella illuminates the marble stairs.

I thought I'd heard of all the Abstract Expressionist painters by now, but here's another one: Al Held. I really like the colors in this work.

In MAKE Volume 14, Michael Zbyszynski showed us how to really geek out in the kitchen by introducing us to Molecular Gastronomy, a movement happening in the culinary world. As he describes it, "Essentially, it involves applying scientific techniques and methodologies to the cooking process. One of the more interesting techniques is the use of common substances to control the texture of foods, often in surprising ways. You don't need a chemistry lab to pull off such effects. With a few inexpensive tools and chemicals, it's possible to use spherification to make all kinds of 'caviar' (and other shapes) in your own kitchen." Michael showed us how to make a "spherical array" (that's Michael pictured above in his kitchen with the array he made) that enables you to quickly make many pieces of caviar. He also shared a recipe to make juice caviar and incorporate it into molecular mojitos! The method isolates the cocktail's ingredients into individual caviars, each with its own distinct color and flavor. The drink flavors come together on the tongue. Here's a closeup of the spherical array:

And here's the molecular mojito:

Michael is joining us again this year at Maker Faire Bay Area on May30th and 31st in San Mateo, Calif. Come on out and meet him, and watch his live Molecular Gastronomy demonstrations!

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bowman9991 writes "Dan Aykroyd reveals that all the original cast have now signed on for Ghostbusters 3, including Sigourney Weaver, Bill Murray, Harold Ramis and Ernie Hudson. Apparently Bill Murray, who holds a one-fifth controlling interest, was very reluctant at first, not even willing to read a third draft of Aykroyd's script. Aykroyd would like to see Ivan Reitman or Harold Ramis direct, wants to introduce a 'new generation' of Ghostbusters, and believes they could be filming the new Ghostbuster movie by winter."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

bowman9991 writes "Dan Aykroyd reveals that all the original cast have now signed on for Ghostbusters 3, including Sigourney Weaver, Bill Murray, Harold Ramis and Ernie Hudson. Apparently Bill Murray, who holds a one-fifth controlling interest, was very reluctant at first, not even willing to read a third draft of Aykroyd's script. Aykroyd would like to see Ivan Reitman or Harold Ramis direct, wants to introduce a 'new generation' of Ghostbusters, and believes they could be filming the new Ghostbuster movie by winter."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Many may associate tie-dyed shirts with hippies, The Grateful Dead and sharing, but apparently one maker of such shirts thought it owned a copyright on certain designs. Michael Scott points us to the news that a tie-dye shirt maker named Bonzai had claimed that another shirt maker, Broder Bros., had copied two of its tie-dye shirt design patterns and color schemes, but thankfully, the judge not only tossed the suit out as frivolous, but also handed over attorneys' fees as well. The judge found it ridiculous that anyone would claim a copyright on such things, noting that there was nothing original in the designs that made them deserving of copyright protection, and ordered the Copyright Office to cancel the registrations:

Plaintiff admits that the tie-dye spiral design is common and not proprietary," Kauffman wrote, "so its only unique contribution was to select the colors red, white, and blue in one design and orange and yellow in the other."

Kauffman found that neither color combo showed even "a modicum of creativity."

"Red, white, and blue are commonly matched colors, perhaps most notably on the American flag. Orange and yellow are adjacent in the spectrum of colors visible to the human eye," Kauffman wrote.

"Placing these basic, predictable color combinations into a pre-existing design does not satisfy the minimum creativity necessary to establish a valid copyright," Kauffman wrote

As a result, Kauffman concluded that suing over the alleged theft of such copyrighted designs amounted to a misuse of copyright law.

"Plaintiff's claim, based upon its selection of two or three commonly-combined colors in what it admits is an otherwise unprotectable design, is objectively unreasonable and frivolous," Kauffman wrote.

In arguing against having to pay attorneys' fees, Bonzai apparently claimed that since the Copyright Office had granted registration for the copyrights, it had every reason to assume they were valid. Of course, this ignores one simple fact: unlike getting a patent, the process of registering a copyright is about as close to an automatic rubber stamp as you can get. It's certainly nice to see a judge completely dismiss a frivolous copyright claim.

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