theodp writes "San Franciscan Charles Pitts has accounts on Facebook, MySpace and Twitter. He runs a Yahoo forum, reads news online and keeps in touch with friends via email. Nothing unusual, right? Except Pitts has been homeless for two years and manages this digital lifestyle from his residence under a highway bridge. Thanks to cheap computers, free Internet access and sheer determination, the WSJ reports that being homeless isn't stopping some from staying wired. 'You don't need a TV. You don't need a radio. You don't even need a newspaper,' says Pitts. 'But you need the Internet.'"

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.)

This has been an exciting---and exhausting---two weeks, guestblogging for Boing. I don't see how the regular Boing bloggers get anything else done.

As a parting offering, I'd like to share some of my reminiscenses about Silicon Valley as I found it when I moved here in 1986.

[Me in 1985, photo by David Abrams. I don't remember exactly why I drew the line on the photo...something about distinguishing between the two halves of the brain, that is, the writer side vs. the programmer side.]

A little background. Over the last year I've been working on a memoir called Nested Scrolls, and I'm hoping to find a publisher for it soon.

The memoir's title has to do with two things: (a) my favorite kinds of cellular automata rules make seething scroll-like patterns that nest together like layers of scrolls, and (b) you can think of writings as being scrolls, and to the extent that a multilevel written work refers to other works, it's a nested scroll.

What I'm posting here is Chapter 10 of Nested Scrolls, called "Hacker"---and this particular chapter is about diving into the Bay Areas scene of yore. Here's an excerpt:

In 1987 I attended an annual event called the Hackers Conference. Remember—hacker was still a good word, so these guys were Silicon Valley programmers and hardware tweakers. Some of them were even fans of my books. The fact that I’d written a science fiction novel called Software had put me on the hackers’ radar.

I brought my computer with its CA axe [that is, its hand-made cellular automata accelerator card from Systems Concepts labs], and I stayed up all night with the hackers, drinking beer, smoking pot, and admiring our weird screens. Although Hollywood often depicts hackers as nerdy, inhibited types, that’s not generally accurate. It’s more common that hackers are like hippies or acid freaks or mad scientists or car mechanics.

And with that I'm outta here. Rock on, y'all, and, if you liked my posts, come see me at Rudy's Blog.

mlingojones writes "The Palm Pre doesn't come out until June 6th, but the Boy Genius Report not only got their hands on one but also posted a review of it. They liked webOS, but not the hardware (especially the keyboard). Overall, they feel that 'once people are able to play a real unit themselves, there will be more than a lot of happy Palm Pre customers.'" On the downside, this review says the keyboard is lousy.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Paul Rose of Institut Fatima demonstrates the versatility of the object-tracking software with his reacBall interface. I expect a jumpsuit covered with these will be showing up quite soon (I hope). [via Create Digital Music]

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An anonymous reader writes with a link to Ars Technica's report that "the EU is considering forcing Windows users to choose a browser to download and install before they can first browse the Internet, according to The Wall Street Journal (subscription required). While the latest Windows 7 builds let you uninstall IE8, 'third-party browser makers like Opera, Mozilla and Google are pushing for tough sanctions against Microsoft. The EU would rather have a "ballot screen" for users to choose which browsers to download and install as well as which one to set as default. The bundling requirement might end up becoming a responsibility for manufacturers.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Dan Smithwick is working on developing a system so that people can design houses, buildings and other structures in Sketchup, then have the parts cut on a Shopbot, which can then be put together with a few more tools than a rubber mallet. Dan has been working with MIT Professor Larry Sass.

Take a look at his site, Physical Design make a design and put your puzzle house together!

At the Faire you'll be able to see first hand how easy and fun the Physical Design Co structures are to assemble and you'll be able to meet the co-founders who have developed this technology.

You can download the 3D model of the San Mateo Artist's Studio from the Physical Design Co website.

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Lyonhrt writes "Engadget and Gizmodo have spilled the beans on the news of the new UMD-less PSP Go that comes with 16GB of memory and a slide screen; also among the features will be built-in Bluetooth and and an undisclosed memory slot. The console will be sold alongside the PSP 3000, no details on price at this time. This is obviously Sony's answer to the lost battle with the PSP Homebrew and Hacking Communities which have cost many thousands of lost sales with custom firmwares."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In this short video, sneering rappers from the young conservative movement bust rhymes about drilling in Alaska, forcing women to bear foetuses to term, eliminating social programs and merging Church and State. Lines include: "Three things taught me conservative love: Jesus, Ronald Reagan, plus Atlas Shrugged;" and "Everyone can succeed because our soldiers bleed."

It's (apparently) not a parody.

Why Conservatives Can't Dance

jeevesbond writes "The alpha version of Google Chrome is now available for GNU/Linux. Google Chrome developer and former Firefox lead Ben Goodger has some problems with the platform though. His complaints range from the lack of a standardised UI toolkit, inconsistencies across applications, the lack of a unified and comprehensive HIG, to GTK not being a very compelling toolkit. With Adobe getting twitchy about the glibc fork and previously describing the various audio systems as welcome to the jungle, is it time to concentrate on consolidation and standardisation in GNU/Linux in general, and the desktop in particular?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I don't know why I remembered this story last night, but that's when it happened.

When I was a kid, in sixth grade in PS 32 in Queens, there was a deal where we could get the NY Times for students. It was a special edition, with some of the big words edited out, or perhaps explained. I got it even though I had been reading the full adult version for a few years.

We also had a weekly quiz that was written by someone at the Times. It was multiple choice and it indicated (I guess) whether or not you had read the Times that week. There was one question on one test that really caused me trouble. What's the largest state in the US? There were four choices, and two of them were Alaska and California. That's a nightmare because they didn't say what the criteria was. Is it largest by area or population? So I chose Alaska, because I felt if you didn't say, it must mean area. Well that's not what they meant and I got the answer wrong. I protested to the teacher, who must have thought: Here's a teaching moment. So she asked me to write a letter to the Times, which I did. She mailed it for me.

Now here's the part that taught me a lot about the Times, and how adults can be ridiculously rude to children. I remember deciding at the time to remember this so when I was an adult I would remember to treat children with respect, which I really try to do.

The Times response came to my teacher, not me. They didn't like something about how I wrote my letter. And they didn't respond to the substance of the challenge, how was a student to know the criteria for the question. I thought it was unfair to put both Alaska and California in the list of choices, without saying what the criteria was. You may think it was a small point, but I was small then, and I wanted to know.

To this day, the Times has remained consistent and so have I. They generally talk over our heads, and respond to the manner in which the challenge is raised, not to its substance. I still keep trying to find new ways to approach this. I guess what I've been trying to say to the Times since sixth grade is this -- We are real people out here. Just like you. And we're smart. So let's talk, without the attitude.

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

Looking back over the advance of physics over the last two hundred years, it's staggering to realize how much our world view has changed. As a science fiction writer, I'm always trying to imagine how much more things might change in the coming two centuries. The really hard thing to anticipate is the completely game-changing advances that occur every so often.

My sense is that, for one thing, we won't be using chip-based computers in two hundred years---any more than we use mechanical calculators now. That's why, in my recent novels Postsingular and Hylozoic, I've been speculating about a world in which our computations escape from our machines and filter into our ordinary matter.

Nick Herbert is one of my favorite offbeat physicists. One of his papers in particular is something I've thought about a lot over the years: "Holistic Physics, or, An Introduction to Quantum Tantra." Here Nick argues that our conscious minds display some of the same features as quantum mechanics. When we're not thinking about anything in particular, our thoughts evolve in a continuous, multi-universe kind of way---but when we focus on something, we carry out something like the quantum collapse that characterizes the process of measurement.

[Brain models from the Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments at Harvard University.]

As I've been saying, I think it's at least in principle possible that the quantum computations in ordinary matter might be capable of carrying out these same kinds of processes---which we normally associate with living, conscious minds. And Nick's paper helps you to think about this idea.

David Deutsch wrote a deep and technical paper about the topic of computation in arbitrary pieces of matter, called "Quantum theory, the Church-Turing principle and the universal quantum computer."

The basic idea is that quantum mechanical systems can act as universal computers, and it's generally believed that any universal computer can emulate a human mind (given the right program, and, aye, there's the rub).

One of our big problems is that we still have such an imperfect notion of how to build a software system that's like a human mind. The best idea along these lines that I've seen in the last few years is in the book On Intelligence, by Jeff Hawkins and Sandra Blakeslee.

Two more rich sources for futuristic ideas.

(1) The arXiv.org site---for instance look at their New Papers on Cosmology and Extragalactic Physics page. It blows my mind that you can so easily access all these wild new papers, easily readable in PDF form. Even if, for the average person, a lot of the writing is incomprehensible gibberish (like the backwards neon sign shown above), you can skate through and pick up some great concepts and buzzwords.

(2) The physicist John Baez's pages. Baez is a deep thinker and a gifted popularizer, adept at imparting the true strangeness of this world.

It's liberating to realize that, as always, we're very much on the edge of knowing what's really going on.

Patrick sez, "A Canadian cinema has been fined C$10,000 for invasion of privacy when it searched a mother and daughter's bags for video cameras, but instead pulled out birth control pills from the daughter's purse. The mother had no idea. She sued. She won."

Staff at the theatre were searching customers' bags for video equipment that could be used for movie piracy.

Security guards didn't find any video equipment in the family's bags, but did turn up a large selection of snack food, which they asked the family to take back to their vehicle, Lurie said.

"They did so willingly. But they continued the search of the bags and while searching they also uncovered some birth control pills belonging to the older daughter," Lurie said.

"Needless to say the mother was not pleased to find out in this manner that her daughter had those pills in her possession."

Cinema ordered to pay $10K in damages for search (Thanks, Patrick!)

Threadbanger hosts Rob and Corinne will be at Maker Faire this weekend, and are hosting a Twitter-based scavenger hunt with an opportunity to get into the Faire for free and with a Threadbanger-branded Janome sewing machine as the grand prize. Fans of ThreadBanger's weekly DIY shows can join in and start finding scavenger hunt clues by following ThreadBanger on Twitter.

The first ten people to arrive on Sunday, May 31st at Maker Faire's Will Call table with the secret password, which will be revealed via ThreadBanger's twitter account, will receive a free ticket to the event and the next clue to continue the hunt. The first two people to arrive will also receive a brand new Kodak Camera. Prizes will be given at each checkpoint with the grand prize being a ThreadBanger-branded Janome sewing machine. Other partners in the contest include Coats and Clark thread company, Simplicity Patterns, Generation-T, Make Magazine, O'Reilly Media and Yudu Personal Screen Printing. The scavenger hunt will take tweeps through some of Maker Faire's best stops. Along the way, participants will pick up new clues by tweeting passwords to @Threadbanger while collecting craft-happy prizes from selected stops. Those who finish the hunt successfully will get to compete for the grand prize: a brand new Threadbanger-branded Janome sewing machine.

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FyreWyr writes "L0phtCrack — now 12 years old — used to be a security 'tool of choice' for black hats, pen-testers, and security auditors alike — that is, until it was sold by L0pht to @stake, then Symantec, to be released and subsequently dropped as LC 5. As an IT security consultant, I used this tool to regularly expose vulnerabilities or recover data when there were few other options available. Eventually, I let it go as tech evolved away. Now, after being returned to its original developers, version 6 was released this week with fresh features: support for 64-bit multiprocessors, (current) Unix and Windows operating systems, and a number of other features, including enhanced handling of NTLM password hashes and support for rainbow tables. Interested parties, especially consultants, will find this shiny new version sports a hefty price tag. It raises doubts in my mind whether it can effectively compete with open source alternatives that go by similar names, but as I found earlier versions so useful, its re-emergence seems worth the mention."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

SoundArts has an interactive "musical petting zoo" for people to experiment with and create some music. They were set up for Eduction Day, and will be at Maker Faire all weekend. Come check them out!

Sound Arts is a multi faceted sound studio, created to serve corporate, advertising, and educational clients as well as a diverse community of musicians, filmmakers, and theater artists. With our outstanding network of producers, teachers, and artists, Sound Arts does all aspects of audio production, educates and connects the creative community, and provides a variety of multimedia and sound solutions that achieve both technical and artistic excellence.

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A lot of change is coming in the Rebooting The News podcast series.

The last episode was so good, it seemed a shame there wasn't a site specifically for the podcast. So I bought a domain and spent a couple of days creating a site for it. (Along the way creating some interesting new desktop software for managing podcasts.)

http://rebootnews.com/

There's a new feed just for RTN podcasts.

http://rebootnews.com/rss.xml

They will continue to appear in the Scripting News feed, so if you're subscribed to that, no need to change anything.

I also made a package of the first ten episodes and uploaded a torrent to Mininova.

http://www.mininova.org/tor/2637891

So if you've missed any episodes, or would just like to have a complete collection through last week, please go get it. BitTorrent is such a rational way to distribute content, and it's under attack by the entertainment industry. This is a perfect non-infringing application of BT, Jay and I want you to have our recordings, so go get em!

If you're new to BitTorrent, it's really easy. On the Mac, I recommend Transmission and on Windows, I use uTorrent. Just follow the instructions on the site to install, then click on the mininova.org link above and click on OK to the prompts that appear. It may take an hour or two to get all 135MB, so just leave it running in the background. Once it's finished, leave it running a little longer so that the next people can download it from you. It's a peer-to-peer system.

And don't worry -- I'm allowed to do this -- I created the podcasts (along with Jay).

dr_dracula writes "Earlier this year, the ext4 filesystem was accepted into the Linux kernel. Shortly thereafter, it was discovered that some applications, such as KDE, were at risk of losing files when used on top of ext4. This was diagnosed as a rift between the design of the ext4 filesystem and the design of applications running on top of ext4. The crux of the problem was that applications were relying on ext3-specific behavior for flushing data to disk, which ext4 was not following. Recent kernel releases include patches to address these issues. My questions to the early adopters of ext4 are about whether the patches have performed as expected. What is your overall feeling about ext4? Do you think is solid enough for most users to trust it with their data? Did you find any significant performance improvements compared to ext3? Is there any incentive to move to ext4, other than sheer curiosity?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Hugh Pickens writes "The image of scientists as objective seekers of truth is periodically jeopardized by the discovery of a major scientific fraud. Recent scandals like Hwang Woo-Suk's fake stem-cell lines or Jan Hendrik Schön's duplicated graphs showed how easy it can be for a scientist to publish fabricated data in the most prestigious journals. Daniele Fanelli has an interesting paper on PLoS ONE where she performs a meta-analysis synthesizing previous surveys to determine the frequency with which scientists fabricate and falsify data, or commit other forms of scientific misconduct. A pooled, weighted average of 1.97% of scientists admitted to having fabricated, falsified or modified data or results at least once — a serious form of misconduct by any standard — and up to 33.7% admitted other questionable research practices. In surveys asking about the behavior of colleagues, admission rates were 14.12% for falsification, and up to 72% for other questionable research practices. Misconduct was reported more frequently by medical/pharmacological researchers than others. 'Considering that these surveys ask sensitive questions and have other limitations, it appears likely that this is a conservative estimate of the true prevalence of scientific misconduct,' writes Fanelli. 'It is likely that, if on average 2% of scientists admit to have falsified research at least once and up to 34% admit other questionable research practices, the actual frequencies of misconduct could be higher than this.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

bughunter writes "Cnet is reporting that Mac clone maker Quo Computer plans to open its first retail location, selling Mac clones, on June 1st. To start, Quo will offer three desktop systems: the Life Q, Pro Q, and Max Q. While details of the components are not yet available, founder Rashantha De Silva said they are looking at Apple's system configurations for guidance. Pricing has also not been finalized on the desktop machines, but the company is looking to start pricing at less than $900. While Quo is starting off with the desktop machines, De Silva said it is looking at offering an Apple TV-like media server and a smaller computer similar to the Mac Mini. He acknowledges that Quo will likely face opposition from Apple, much like Psystar. 'They probably will (sue us),' De Silva said. 'There are others doing this, but we have a different attitude. There are thousands of people in the "Hackintosh" market, but many of them are creating bad products. I don't think anyone wins in that environment.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This week on the most excellent Pseudopod horror podcast, David Nickle's fantastic story "The Inevitability of Earth," a tale about the ignobility of those who would fly:

When Michael was just a kid, Uncle Evan made a movie of Grandfather. He used an old eight-millimeter camera that wound up with a key and had three narrow lenses that rotated on a plate. Michael remembered holding the camera. It was supposedly light-weight for its time, but in his six-year-old hands, it seemed like it weighed a ton. Uncle Evan had told him to be careful with it; the camera was a precision instrument, and it needed to be in good working order if the movie was going to be of any scientific value.

The movie was of Grandfather doing his flying thing -- flapping his arms with a slow grace as he shut his eyes and turned his long, beak-ish nose to the sky. Most of the movie was only that: a thin, middle-aged man, flapping his arms, shutting his eyes, craning his neck. Grandfather's apparent foolishness was compounded by the face of young Michael flashing in front of the lens; blocking the scene, and waving like an idiot himself. Then the camera moved, and Michael was gone -

And so was Grandfather.

Dave's got a new short story collection coming soon, available for pre-order: Monstrous Affections.

Pseudopod 144: The Inevitability of Earth

MP3 Link

Pseudopod podcast feed

ericatcw writes "It was reported last week that Microsoft had cut access to its Windows Live Messenger instant messaging service to citizens of five countries with whom the US has trade embargoes. Now, it turns out that Google and, apparently, AOL have taken similar actions. According to a lawyer quoted by Computerworld, even free, downloaded apps are viewed as 'exports' by the US government — meaning totally in-the-cloud services such as e-mail may escape the rules. Either way, there appear to be a number of ways determined citizens of Syria, Iran, and Cuba can get around the ban."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Great Frog's Michael Mouse Ring is a sweet chunk of chunky, infringing silver: a skull in Mickey ears.

Michael Mouse Ring

MaizeMan writes "Not for the easily distracted: a Belmont software developer's hand-built CPU was featured in Wired recently. Starting with a $50 wire wrap board, Steve Chamberlin built his CPU with 1253 pieces of wire, each wire wrapped by hand at both ends. Chamberlin salvaged parts from '70s and '80s era computers, and the final result is an 8-bit processor with keyboard input, a USB connection, and VGA graphical output. More details are available on the developer's blog."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

MOTO Labs will be unveiling their "DIY Android Home Energy Monitor" today at Maker Faire. MOTO's Daniell Hebert will be giving a talk, "Android Beyond the Phone," at 3:30pm Sunday, on the main stage. The MOTO Labs booth is 113 in Expo Hall.

So what is the AHEM?

The MOTO DIY Android Home Energy Monitor (AHEM) utilizes an average wireless network. Wireless webcams take pictures of the ever-changing dials on the user's utility meters. A BeagleBoard running Android and the MOTO AHEM custom applications push the pictures up to a Flickr photo set.

MOTO AHEM application prompts and transcribes numbers into your Flickr image tag. Saving the image spurs the MOTO Labs' Google Gadget to automatically chart meter activity on the user's Google home page.

More information can be found here on their website.

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snydeq writes "Google will add scripting capabilities to Google Docs, allowing organizations to customize its online applications and automate tasks. Google plans to sign up about 1,000 customers over the next few weeks to test the feature, called Google Apps Script. It will be tested initially in Google Spreadsheets and extended to other Google Docs applications over time. The company isn't saying yet when Apps Script — which is based on JavaScript with object-based extensions added by Google — will be widely available. Google Docs users can already apply to try it out."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Friday was Education Day at Maker Faire. While makers were busy setting up their booths, and the Maker Shed was being stocked, groups of students came through the Maker Faire site for workshops and to see the whole weekend preparation come together.

Teachers, parents and students all came see great projects, try their hand at building and crafting and meet the people who make things for their passion. At the beginning of the day, there were a lot of empty booth spaces, as teh day went on, makers, exhibitors and vendors filled up their real estate with projects, set up demonstration spaces and got their equipment out of the boxes and up and running.

If you came to education day, tell us about what you saw, what you did and what most impressed you.

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Among the free papercraft downloads at Canon's website is this beautiful model of the structure of the sun -- a perfect project for a sunny weekend!

Structure of the Sun (via Make)

I always enjoy riding my bicycle in new places, so I was very excited to hear that a bunch of makers will be riding to the San Mateo County Fairgrounds in the morning.

Join the ride from Dolores Park with the Rock The Bike crew and other two-wheeled enthusiasts. I'll be riding into town to help guide the group down to the Faire on the coastal route.

You can alternately follow the Rock The Bike route.

There is a $10 discount for attendees arriving by bicycle, and there is a bicycle valet to lavish your bicycle with love while you enjoy the festivities.

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A former FBI interrogator who successfully extracted secrets from senior Al Qaeda members using psychological tricks has gone public with his feelings on the ineffectiveness of torture. As he explained on CBC's As It Happens, torture is especially bad when you've got a "ticking bomb" situation, as a good psychological interrogator can establish rapport in hours, while torturing Al Quaeda suspects required dozens of sessions with waterboards and days of sleep deprivation to get any intelligence (and what it got, no one trusts):

Ali Soufan, a former FBI interrogator, revealed in an article being released in June that Osama Bin Laden's bodyguard opened up about the 9/11 terror attacks only after being offered -- sugar free cookies.

Bin Laden lieutenant Abu Jandal is a diabetic, Soufan said, and wouldn't eat sugar cookies he'd been offered.

"Soufan noticed that he didn't touch any of the cookies that had been served with tea: 'He was a diabetic and couldn't eat anything with sugar in it,' Time's Bobby Ghosh wrote. "At their next meeting, the Americans brought him some sugar-free cookies, a gesture that took the edge off Abu Jandal's angry demeanor.

"We had showed him respect, and we had done this nice thing for him," Soufan told Ghosh. "So he started talking to us instead of giving us lectures..."

"It took more questioning, and some interrogators' sleight of hand, before the Yemeni gave up a wealth of information about al-Qaeda -- including the identities of seven of the 9/11 bombers -- but the cookies were the turning point," Ghosh writes.

"After that, he could no longer think of us as evil Americans," Soufan said. "Now he was thinking of us as human beings."

Cookies, not torture, convinced al Qaeda suspect to talk, FBI interrogator says (Thanks, Mark!)

Ben sez, "A film from the 1939 World's Fair showing a Chrysler being built in Stop Action animation. Originally filmed in 'Three-Dimensional Polaroid Film.'"

Man, this thing has got it all: golden age World's Fair, that fantastic chipper music, dancing brightly colored machine-parts... I want to crawl in and nestle among the sparkplugs.

Exclusive: Chrysler Builds a Car (Thanks, Ben!)

archatheist writes "Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany have engineered a mouse whose FOXP2 gene has been swapped out for a different (human) version. This is interesting because the gene is implicated in human language, and this has changed how mice squeak. 'In a region of the brain called the basal ganglia, known in people to be involved in language, the humanized mice grew nerve cells that had a more complex structure. Baby mice utter ultrasonic whistles when removed from their mothers. The humanized baby mice, when isolated, made whistles that had a slightly lower pitch, among other differences, Dr. Enard says. Dr. Enard argues that putting significant human genes into mice is the only feasible way of exploring the essential differences between people and chimps, our closest living relatives.' The academic paper was published in Cell."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Canon has a bunch of free papercraft models available, including this awesome sun papercraft. Via New World Geek.

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It's no secret that those of us who have been in favor of pushing back against the worst abuses of intellectual property law have been disappointed by the Obama administration -- which brought in a number of entertainment industry lawyers and seemed to side with IP holders over the public at almost every turn... until now. We've talked about the importance of the lawsuit over Cablevision's remote DVR system, and whether it represented copyright infringement. The appeals court had ruled that just because the DVR was hosted at Cablevision's datacenter instead of in a house it wasn't infringement. This makes perfect sense. Yet the entertainment industry has been claiming that allowing Cablevision to host DVRs on its own premise is infringement and Cablevision has to pay extra for the right to offer the same exact TiVo-type service that anyone can use in their home. Earlier this year, the Supreme Court asked the new Solicitor General to weigh in. At the time, we noted that this could be a good thing, since one of the last things Solicitor General Elena Kagan did before leaving Harvard to join the administration was recruit Larry Lessig to Harvard.

And, indeed, it appears that Kagan has not succumbed to entertainment industry's tortured logic on this issue and has recommended that the Supreme Court not take the case, saying that the appeals court ruling reasonably resolved the issues in the case. Either way, it's nice to see that the administration hasn't been totally taken over by those who believe in twisting copyright law to protect obsolete business models.

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Yesterday, Sony Online Entertainment representative Daniel Myers announced that The Matrix Online will be shut down on July 31st. The game launched in 2005 after several delays and false starts, and shortly thereafter SOE bought the rights to operate the game from developer Monolith. Now, four years later, the game will join the ranks of closed MMOs. In a forum post, Myers said, "The team will also be whipping up an end-of-the-world event. It won't be quite the same as having over 100 developers in the game as Agents like when we ended beta, but we have 4 years of tricks up our sleeve. It'll be a chance to revisit all the things that make MxO the memorable experience it is. And how could we pull the plug without crushing everyone's RSI just one more time?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A few weeks back, Dennis wrote about a recent Malcolm Gladwell article in the New Yorker about innovation, but I was just shown another article from the same issue, by Adam Gropnik, which may be even more interesting. Gopnik points to evidence challenging the idea that "necessity is the mother of invention," by noting that more innovation seems to occur in times of abundance, rather than times of hardship. The idea is that in times of hardship you're just focused on getting through the day. You don't have time to experiment and try to improve things -- you make do with what you have. It's in times of plenty that people finally have time to mess around and experiment, invent and then innovate.

This makes a lot of sense... and certainly fits with plenty of other things we've seen in recent research. Innovation tends to occur not because of one brilliant idea from one brilliant individual -- but as an ongoing process, with lots of folks tossing different ideas at the wall, and seeing what sticks. Invention is the beginning process, but then people innovate around various inventions to improve it and make it acceptable to the market. In fact, this is why we tend to think that the long run impact of investment bubbles isn't usually bad. Historically, the impact of bubbles has actually been quite good, and it's for exactly these reasons. Within the bubble there is tremendous abundance, and that allows for many different ideas to get tested incredibly quickly. The bad ones fail, but plenty of good ideas (and infrastructure) stick around. It's bad if you get caught up in the investment bubble, but it's good for the overall economy in the long run.

This also should (again) get people to rethink some issues surrounding patents. If it's that abundance and experimenting that leads to all that innovation, aren't we holding back that innovation by enforcing artificial scarcity, and allowing one company to entirely block others from doing the necessary experiments? In Chris Anderson's latest book, he builds on Carver Mead's idea about transistors becoming so abundant that it makes sense to "waste" them. This makes a tremendous amount of sense if you start to follow through the economic implications of "wasting" goods that are effectively infinite. When "wasted," they create new opportunities where none existed before. The innovation that comes out of abundance comes from such "waste." It comes from the ability to invent and tinker and experiment and see what sticks -- and you can't do that when you have massive scarcities -- real or artificial. So why is it that our innovation policy is still focused on enforcing scarcities when that's the exact opposite of what's needed to encourage innovation?

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We've discussed recently some of the basic conflicts between the First Amendment and copyright law. The First Amendment, of course, bars Congress from making any law that restricts the freedom of speech, and copyright law does, in many ways, restrict the use of speech. I'm going to have much more to say on this issue shortly, but Michael Scott recently pointed us to a related issue, about how the ongoing attempts of the US to push China into implementing stricter copyright law, which may actually aid the Chinese government in stamping out political dissent (something that the US also claims it's against). The article discusses how western nations have often explained away the conflict between copyright and free speech: a clear distinction between idea and expression (though, many question this) and a strong fair use defense. However, the article points out that the way China is looking at copyright laws, these don't appear to be much of a factor. Now, the Chinese government certainly doesn't care, as they've never been big advocates of free speech. But, for the US, policymakers should be aware that in pushing for stronger copyright enforcement, they may be handing the gov't a tool to crack down on dissent and free speech.

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Chabil Ha' writes "Heard the rumors that the much-maligned Windows 7 Starter Edition would be able to run more than three concurrent applications? Today, the Windows team made it official: 'Based on the feedback we've received from partners and customers asking us to enable a richer small notebook PC experience with Windows 7 Starter, we've decided to enable Windows 7 Starter customers the ability to run as many applications simultaneously as they would like, instead of being constricted to the 3 application limit that the previous Starter editions included. We believe these changes will make Windows 7 Starter an even more attractive option for customers who want a small notebook PC for very basic tasks, like browsing the web, checking email and personal productivity.' Small consolation, of course, if you want to watch a DVD natively, but I'm sure this won't stop the Slashdot crowd from enabling it."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

We've discussed in the past how locksmiths are apparently upset that geeks online have revealed that lockpicking is really easy, but it's not just the locksmiths. It's the lock makers themselves. Wired has a fascinating article about one of the world's most well known lock picker, who makes it a practice to publicly expose how vulnerable certain locks are. Not so long ago, he and a colleague figured out how to quickly open Medeco locks, which many had considered to be the most secure locks of all -- and are used all over the world in gov't high security buildings. So how has Medeco responded? Basically by trying to ignore the guy... then to insult him and then to discount what he clearly has done. It's just like software companies who try to deny software vulnerabilities, except that it's much easier to patch some software that to patch a vulnerable lock. While many in the lock world are apparently pissed off at this guy, Marc Weber Tobias, they should be happy that he's making sure the locks are really secure. Because, you can pretty much be assured that he's not the only one doing all of this -- but the others who are figuring it out aren't talking about it, but are using the knowledge to their own advantage.

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I wasn't at Maker Faire setup day for more than a few minutes before I ran into Limor Freid of Adafruit awesomness and Windell Oskay of Evil Mad Scientist Labs, well, evilness. I'm honored to have received from each of them truly unique and wonderful calling cards.

These are quite a bit more functional than your average card. Limor's is a working Spirograph with bonus rulers at the edges. EMSL's is a Tiny 2313 prototyping board. I was hoping to declare a winner on Sunday of Bestest Maker Faire Calling Card, but may need to chicken out and have winners both in the Mechanical and Electronic divisions! Anyone else done up a super rad card?

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For years and years and years, the Australian government has been looking to come up with a rationale for censoring the internet. The most recent plan has gone through some hiccups with mass protests. But, of course, the gov't has continued to push on, claiming that such a censored blacklist is important to stop child porn. Except... a few months back, the censored list was leaked, and a review of the list now shows that less than 32% of the sites were actually about child porn (via Michael Scott).

This is one of the (many) reasons why such secret blacklists are always a bad idea. Given the opportunity to censor content, it's too tempting not to expand the list with general stuff the censors "don't like" rather than the actual intended purpose of the list. And that, of course, is why gov'ts always insist that such lists should be secret rather than publicly reviewable. Of course, it's worth noting that as part of the admission that the list has such a small percentage of what was supposed to make up the entire list, the Australian government says that it's having the police look into the leak of the list. Why? The only thing the leak exposed was how the gov't was lying to the public. That shouldn't be illegal. That should be welcomed whistle-blowing of gov't abuse.

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ausekilis writes "Many outlets are reporting that Time Warner has confirmed plans to spin off AOL. All that's left to deal with are a few financial hurdles, such as buying out Google's 5% stake in AOL. The interesting part of the story is that both AOL's CEO and Time Warner's CEO said effectively the same thing, that AOL will be better off as an independent unit, as opposed to 'a cog in the Time Warner wheel.' Interesting to note that when they originally merged, the idea was for AOL to be a one-stop shop for all your internet goods. Makes you wonder what would have happened if Time Warner had invested in AOL as an exclusive media outlet for movies, TV, music, etc. Perhaps AOL would have regained some speed and become the prominent household name it once was, instead of being that company who sent us all the free coasters."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.