snydeq writes "Microsoft pulled the plug on Windows XP a year ago today, no longer selling new copies in most venues. Yet according to a report from InfoWorld, various downgrade paths to XP are keeping the operating system very much alive, particularly among businesses. In fact, despite Microsoft trumpeting Vista as the most successful version of Windows ever sold, more than half of business PCs have subsequently downgraded Vista-based machines to XP, according to data provided by community-based performance-monitoring network of PCs. Microsoft recently planned to further limit the ability to downgrade to XP now that Windows 7 is in the pipeline, but backlash against the licensing scheme prompted the company to change course, extending downgrade rights on new PCs from April 2010 to April 2011."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Today at Boing Boing Gadgets, we paid homage to the Palo Alto Research Center, or PARC, the amazing research facility responsible for hundreds of patents and myriad innovations in technology. Steven and Lisa visited the facility in May and got a behind-the-scenes look at several of their newest innovations. As a result, we have:

&bull pictures and diagrams of the first Ethernet cable in the world;

&bull the carpet on which graphic user interfaces were invented;

&bull a smart mirror that helps indecisive shoppers compare outfits;

&bull a gallery of caution signs seen along PARC's many corridors;

&bull a contest in which you could win an Alto user handbook or a Smalltalk instruction manual;

&bull an interview with PARC employees about how they geek out and party and eat good food;

&bull an explanation of the MrTaggy search engine;

&bull pretty photos of flexible electronics;

&bull and the mystery of Alan Kay's office. On the non-PARC-related front, we have Rob's review of the Fit PC2; Jonathan Harris' new Sputnik project; and Dell's ultra-mobile audiovisual presentation platform. Enjoy!

A girl discovers an overheated bear in the forest. She helps him by shaving his fur in hard-to-reach places. Says Japan Probe: "This commercial is apparently an advertisement showing how Nisshinbo cares about global warming and the environment."

If you see Kogoro Kurata's Fiat 500 bulldozer coming down the road, get ready to jump out of the way. With a top speed of 3 kilometers per hour, it's not stopping for nobody. (Via Pink Tentacle)

An anonymous reader brings us another bump on the bumpy road of Chris Anderson's new book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price, which we discussed a week ago. Now the Times (UK) is reporting on a dustup between Anderson and Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point, Blink, and Outliers. Recently Gladwell reviewed, or rather deconstructed, Anderson's book in the New Yorker. Anderson has responded with a blog post that addresses some, but by no means all, of Gladwell's criticisms, and The Times is inclined to award the match to Gladwell on points. Although their reviewer didn't notice that Gladwell, in setting up the idea of "Free" as a straw man, omitted a critical half of Stewart Brand's seminal quote.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ed Kohler points us to a long, but fascinating blog post, by Stuart Shieber, a CS professor at Harvard, discussing the somewhat ridiculous copyright situation that many academics deal with in trying to promote their own works. I've heard similar stories from other professors I know, but this one is worth reading. Shieber points out the importance of academics getting their research published in journals, but how annoying it is that most journals require those academics to give up all sorts of rights -- including the right to distribute their own research on their websites. However, he notes that most published academics simply ignore this rule, and you end up with a "don't ask, don't tell" policy. Even though they're legally prevented from putting up a PDF of their work on their website, they do so anyway, and journals just look the other way.

Shieber, however, finds this situation to be a bad thing, and instead adds an amendment that at least grants him the right to publish his own research on his own website. It seems pretty ridiculous that this should even be an issue at all. He notes that most journals haven't had a problem with this -- which is surprising, but good to hear. He did run into one publisher, however, who fought him on it, and after lots of back and forth, his paper was pulled. The reasoning that the journal gave didn't make much sense, and Shieber shows how wrong they are (for example, they claim that if professors published the works on their website, demand for journal subscriptions would go down -- but Shieber did a quick look, and found that about 80% of those who published in the same journal had posted the content anyway, and it hadn't killed off the journal, so arguing against him seemed pointless). Eventually, he was able to convince the journal to change its policies and got his paper published, but it delayed publication for a while.

It's really unfortunate that journals still think that locking up such content makes sense. The idea that researchers shouldn't be allowed to share their own research with the world because some journal needs artificial scarcity for its business model is something that needs to be put to rest.

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Human ingenuity (and a touch of foolishness) on parade at thereifixedit.com (Thanks, Coop!)

Ironsmith Kogoro Kurata took the body of a Fiat 500 and put it on an old set of Cat tracks. Tortoise-timed trips to the store, and hilarity, ensued.

Monkey Farm [via Pink Tentacle]

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Ponca City, We Love You writes "The NY Times reports that farmers and ranchers oppose a government program to identify livestock with microchip tags that would allow the computerized recording of livestock movements from birth to the slaughterhouse. Proponents of the USDA's National Animal Identification System say that computer records of cattle movements mean that when a cow is discovered with bovine tuberculosis or mad cow disease, its prior contacts can be swiftly traced. Ranchers say the extra cost of the electronic tags places an onerous burden on a teetering industry. Small groups of cattle are often rounded up in distant spots and herded into a truck by a single person who could not simultaneously wield the hand-held scanner needed to record individual animal identities. The ranchers also note that there is no Internet connection on many ranches for filing to a regional database. 'Lobbyists from corporate mega-agribusiness designed this program to destroy traditional small sustainable agriculture,' says Genell Pridgen, an owner of Rainbow Meadow Farms. The notion of centralized data banks, even for animals, has also set off alarms among libertarians who oppose NAIS. One group has issued a bumper sticker that reads, 'Tracking cattle now, tracking you soon.' 'They can't comprehend the vastness of a ranch like this,' says Jay Platt, the third-generation owner of a 22,000 acre New Mexico ranch. 'This plan is expensive, it's intrusive, and there's no need for it.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Evil Mad Scientists are rightfully fascinated with Sichuan peppercorns.

Sichuan peppercorns, oh yeah! Raven of Made with Molecules after eating them wrote, "There's a war in my mouth." They create a riot of numbing and tingling sensations, particularly if you can get relatively fresh ones (i.e. not stale from sitting around in a Whole Foods bulk bin). Raven links to an abstract about the particular anesthetic-sensitive potassium channels inhibited by hydroxy-alpha-sanshool, one of the components of sichuan peppercorns that make them so exciting.

Sichuan peppercorns

Michigan public librarians Mary Kelly and Holly Hibner have a blog featuring awful library books. The book above, Those Amazing Leeches, is a prime example of an awful library book. Awful Library Books (Via Hang Fire Books)

Aaron Martin-Colby points us to Good Magazine's softball interview with Erich Spangenberg, considered by many to be one of the more successful "patent trolls" or "non-practicing entities" out there. The interview is a huge disappointment, though, as the interviewer basically only gives a superficial hearing to the reasons why Spangenberg is causing tremendous harm, and instead tries to paint him as a "Robin Hood" figure, taking money from super wealthy companies (she leaves out the "distributing it to the poor" part, because, you know, that doesn't actually happen). She ignores the economic arguments (which are long and quite detailed) of how much harm such activities do to the economy by shifting resources from actually making stuff to just transferring money around to lawyers.

But worst of all, the article presents Spangenberg as always being right and always having big companies settle (or that he wins his cases). You would think that any profile on Spangenberg would include little facts like that he was caught shuffling patents around in order to sue companies multiple times over the same patent -- despite a settlement promising not to. Doing so eventually cost Spangenberg $4 million. Robin Hood? Or how about his attempts to stretch what highly questionable patents cover? For example, patent 5,493,490, which covers a system for making electronic proposals to buy cars (which, yes, you would think seems obvious enough, but what do you know?), which Spangenberg is asserting against dozens of companies who don't sell cars, but do sell other stuff online.

The problem isn't that there are people who sue without ever making stuff (even though that's what some claim). The problem is that the patents are ridiculous and never should have been granted. Giving someone a total monopoly on an invention (and, despite claims to the contrary, in reality, patents do cover "ideas" not just inventions) should only be granted in extreme circumstances. Yet, the Patent Office hands them out like lollipops to children at times. But, unfortunately, this interview doesn't get into any of that. The reporter seems swept off her feet by Spangenberg bragging about his wealth and who he knows, and doesn't bother to ask any of the important questions.

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snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Randall Kennedy examines would-be Microsoft Office competitors SoftMaker Office and OpenOffice.org and finds the results surprising. OpenOffice.org — frequently cited as the most viable Office competitor — has pushed for Office interoperability in version 3.1, adding import support for files in Office 2007's native Open XML format. But, as Kennedy found in Office-compatibility testing, that support remains mostly skin deep. 'Factor in OpenOffice's other well-documented warts — buggy Java implementation, CPU-hogging auto-update system, quirky font rendering — and it's easy to see why the vast majority of IT shops continue to reject this pretender to the Microsoft Office throne,' Kennedy writes. SoftMaker Office, however, 'shows that good things often still come in small packages.' Geared more toward mobile computing, the suite's 'compact footprint and low overhead make it ideal for underpowered systems, and its excellent compatibility with Office 2003 file formats means it's a safe choice for heterogeneous environments where external data access isn't a priority.'" Note that SoftMaker Office is not free software — it costs $79.95 — and there is no version for Macintosh.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Over on GeekDad, Dana Bostic came up with this simple backyard cool-the-kids "hack" -- a hose sprayer set to "shower," zip-tied to a tall step ladder pouring down onto a trampoline -- so the kids can work up a sweat and cool off at the same time!

Keeping the Kids Cool This Summer [Thanks, Shawn!]

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Podcast author-legend JC Hutchins sez,

My book, "Personal Effects: Dark Art," came out earlier this month. To introduce readers to that world, I'm rolling out a podcast-exclusive prequel novella called "Personal Effects: Sword of Blood" -- the story features a lost sword mystically possessed by the blood of a dangerous, supernatural creature.

The premise of "Personal Effects" is to blur the line between fiction and reality (it features a cool Alternate Reality Game component), and that's what I'm doing with this promo. I'm actually giving away a real, battle-ready 40"-long sword, a replica of the iconic weapon used by Holy Roman Emperor Charles V of Spain, back in the 1500s. It was crafted by the same dudes who made swords for the "Highlander" TV show.

Giving away a sword wasn't enough: Written on its blade will be a "Personal Effects" flash fiction story written by myself and fellow CC-rockin' new media thriller novelist Matt Wallace, who donated the sword to the cause. And we're signing our collaboration, on the blade, *in our own blood* -- making this a "real" Sword of Blood.

Yes, we were inspired by the KISS comic book. :)

Participating in the giveaway is easy-peasy; folks simply need to evangelize the release of "Personal Effects: Dark Art" to friends or co-workers.

Personal Effects: Sword of Blood

Personal Effects

Has anyone ever actually bought a laptop where the battery length claims were anything close to what you actually got? I know I haven't. I tend to read online reviews from various testers to get a better sense of how long a battery can really last, but apparently some are so annoyed by the bogus claims from PC makers that they've filed a class action lawsuit. I'm all for things that would encourage computer makers to be more honest, though these sorts of class action lawsuits always seem a little silly. Are people really significantly "harmed" if the battery life doesn't live up to expectations? These cases usually seem more like opportunities for a few lawyers to get a bunch of money out of companies. The real issue should be that the FTC should have investigated the false claims from laptop makers.

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The_AV8R writes "In a recent interview, Peter Van Loan, the new Canadian Public Safety minister, says ISPs should be able to provide private user information without a warrant. (The only example he gave was cases of child pornography; the interviewer pointed out that in these cases ISPs are already at liberty to divulge customer information without a warrant, but that the proposed rules would make that mandatory whenever the police ask.) He was adamant that in regard to IP addresses, names, cell phone numbers, and email addresses: '...that is not the kind of information about which Canadians have a legitimate expectation of privacy.' The minister denied — even when presented with an audio clip proving otherwise — that his predecessor had promised never to allow the police to wiretap the Internet without a warrant."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

(Image from Hang Fire Books Flickr stream)

Manybooks.net has pulp author Charles Willeford's noir novella Wild Wives available for free in a variety of ebook formats.

Willeford, along with Fredric Brown, is one of my favorite pulp crime fiction writers because his work transcends the genre. From Willeford's Wikipedia entry: "Steve Erickson suggests that Willeford's crime novels are the 'genre's equivalent of Philip K. Dick's best science fiction novels. They don't really fit into the genre.'" Wild Wives by Charles Willeford Buy on Amazon.

Metaplace, a service that lets you design your own virtual worlds, has now launched embedding, so that you can stick your world (or your friends' worlds) on your website.

* You can use it as a gathering space for your community -- on forums, for example, or as this user has done, as a way to foster community for her comics shop.

* You can make it the central gathering spot for a Ning community, as 3DSquared has done for the Digital Workforce Intensives in Louisiana.

* If you're a musician, you can hold your live shows right there on your site, complete with streaming audio and an audience, as Grace McDunnough plans to do.

* Over time, crazier uses will come about, such as this experiment in using virtual worlds to annotate the real world by embedding a Metaplace world on a geolocation in Google Maps.

Embed virtual worlds anywhere

(Disclosure: I am an advisor to Metaplace)

(Download MP4 / Watch on YouTube / Watch it at boingboingvideo.com.)

Founders of The Pirate Bay have made a deal to sell off "the world's largest BitTorrent tracker" to a Swedish gaming company for about $7.8 million.

More than 20 million visitors use the site each month. This April, TPB's three founders and a representative of their ISP were sentenced to a year in prison and damages of about $4 million over allegations of copyright violation.

A week before the news was announced, I interviewed Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde at the Open Video Conference in New York City, about that lawsuit, and about their plans for the future. He mentioned that "huge, huge news" was coming up, but refused to disclose the news at that time. An edited version of our conversation above, including Peter's explanation of why he believes filesharing and anonymity are good for democracy, is above.

(Special thanks to OVC organizers Elizabeth Stark Dean Jansen, Eddie Codel, and Intelligent TV for production assistance).

Related: My former colleague Ben Fritz at the LA Times has this piece up about the sale, analyzing the news from Hollywood's perspective.

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Sponsor shout-out: This week's Boing Boing Video episodes are brought to you in part by WEPC.com, in partnership with Intel and Asus. WePC.com is a site where users come together to "share ideas, images and inspiration about the ideal PC." Participants' designs, feature ideas and community feedback will be evaluated by ASUS and "will influence the blueprint for an actual notebook PC built by ASUS with Intel inside."

Glyn Moody writes "Detractors of free software like to point out it's not really 'free,' and claim that its Total Cost of Ownership is often comparable with closed-source solutions if you take everything into account. And yet, despite their enthusiasm for including all the costs, they never include a very real extra that users of Microsoft's products frequently have to pay: the cost of cleaning up malware infections. For example, the UK city of Manchester has just paid out nearly $2.5 million to clean up the Conficker worm, most of which was 'a £1.2m [$2million] bill in the IT department, including £600,000 [$1 million] getting "consultancy support" to fix the problems, which including drafting in experts from Microsoft.' To make the comparisons fair, isn't it about time these often massive costs were included in TCO calculations?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Britain's keeping mandatory, RFID-enabled biometric ID cards that can be read without your knowledge or permission for immigrants like me:

Foreign nationals from outside the European Economic Area would still be required to have ID cards with 50,000 already issued, he said.

The Conservatives said the decision was a retreat.

"They have spent millions on the scheme so far -- the Home Secretary thinks it has been a waste and wants to scrap it, but the prime minister won't let him," said the party's home affairs spokesman Chris Grayling.

"So we end up with an absurd fudge instead."

Britain drops plans to make ID cards compulsory (Thanks, Dickon!)

How badly do you think the RIAA wants Jammie Thomas to settle? Since the verdict came down, the organization has done everything it possibly can to distance itself from the $1.92 million verdict against her for file sharing. While willing to play up the ruling itself the organization seems to recognize that the insanity of the $1.92 million doesn't do it any favors. Even the musicians whose music was part of the case are embarrassed by the amount. In an ideal world, the RIAA would love to settle the lawsuit for some lower amount so it can run around touting the "risks" of file sharing without having people laugh outloud when hearing that someone had to pay $1.92 million for potentially sharing 24 songs that could be bought for $1 each.

So, you get a slightly bizarre situation, where it's the RIAA proactively reaching out to Thomas to try to settle the lawsuit -- but so far Thomas apparently isn't interested. I've been saying that I thought she would settle, but the longer this goes on, the more I wonder if she's actually planning to fight on. If so, this could certainly represent a case to examine the statutory rates associated with copyright violations. The verdict seems so out of proportion with the supposed "crime" that it's difficult to see it pass the laugh test. However, there's a halfway decent chance that a court punts on the issue, saying (as the Supreme Court did in the Eldred case) that such questions are up to Congress, rather than the courts. Of course, if the case is to move forward, it would help to have lawyers who have had more than a few weeks to study up on the issues, and who didn't make public pronouncements that were distractions rather than anything related to the actual case.

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Continuing with their fine series of tutorial videos, Humberto from NerdKits shows a number of basic experiments you can do with a DC motor, how EMF, resistance, and inductance influence the design of a motor control circuit, and finally, how to use toggled digital output and pulse-width modulation in driving the motor via a microcontroller.

NerdKits video tutorials [via Hack a Day]

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As IBM continues to build out, Jazz, their community-oriented development site, technical lead Dr. Erich Gamma has offered to answer questions about Jazz or anything else in his realm of expertise. Among his many accomplishments, Erich worked for Kent Beck on the Java unit testing framework, JUnit, and was actively involved until JUnit 4. Dr Gamma was also one of the fathers of Eclipse and the original lead on the Eclipse Java development tools. Feel free to fire away on Eclipse, Java, JUnit, the Rational suite, the Jazz site, or anything else you think Erich might be able to answer. Usual Slashdot interview rules apply.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Over on Boing Boing Gadgets, our Lisa's got an historical look at the dawn of networking:

Behind an ordinary door in a nondescript room hosting several printers and copiers at PARC is the world's first Ethernet cable. In 1973, Bob Metcalfe sent an internal memo to his colleagues at Xerox proposing a local system of interacting workstations, files, and printers. The devices would all be linked by one coaxial cable, he said, and would run within a local area network. He called the system an Ether Network, or Ethernet. By 1976, there were over 100 devices linked into Metcalfe's local network, and it was even used to test out the world's first laser printer, which was being developed concurrently in another research facility within Xerox. Metcalfe and his assistant David Boggs published their findings in the Association for Computing Machinery later that year. The rest is history.

Photo and original diagram of the world's first ethernet cable

Discuss this on Boing Boing Gadgets

William writes in with the following tale:

"The Taiwanese music performance and copy right society called MUST, which is similar to the PRS in Britian, has send a take down notice to a popular Taiwanese blog hosting site, Wretch, because one of the user has posted copyrighted music on their blog. The offending blog was taken down and contents deleted.

The catch on this is that the person who posted the music, Shia Ho Shen (English artist name: A Chord), posted music that he himself wrote and performed. He sent an email to MUST asking about the situation and received a standard form letter telling him that copyrighted material are protected intellectual property and implied that he has no right to authorize himself for posting his own material.

Apparently, A Chord's previous agency, without his consent, has signed him up with MUST and thus MUST has all right to authorize his content and collect fees -- and block him from posting his own music.

After this incident A Chord has started the process to remove himself from MUST's artist list, started a new blog and posted this whole incident and posted all his songs online at StreetVoice for fans to listen to before purchasing his CD.

The specific links he sent, including to the blog post itself, are in Mandarin. Here's the Google translation which isn't all that clear. Also this is from a little while ago, so I'm not sure if there's been any updates... but if folks out there have any updates, please fill us in via the comments.

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SailorSpork sends in a BBC report that "China is delaying a controversial plan requiring all new computers sold in the country to be equipped with an Internet filtering software, state media says. The filter, called Green Dam Youth Escort, was to have been required from Wednesday, but the ministry of industry said computer makers needed more time." The submitter adds: "Except of course for Sony, who as reported earlier lacked the moral fiber to hold off installing the spyware, which reportedly is ridden with security holes and uses stolen code. Sony actually managed to ship ahead of the schedule."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes "Kudos to NASA and the Japanese trade ministry for mapping 99% of the Earth's surface, surpassing their previous effort, with which the new data will be amalgamated. Apparently, the data will be free to download and use."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

(Ed. Note: We recently gave the Boing Boing Video website a makeover that includes a new, guest-curated microblog: the "BBVBOX." Here, folks whose taste in web video we admire tweet the latest clips they find. I'll be posting periodic roundups here on the motherBoing.)

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More @BBVBOX: boingboingvideo.com

President Obama is the latest in a rather long line of politicians to start calling out video games as being something that is bad for kids and should be taken away from them, as encouragement to go outside and play:

The second step that we can all agree on is to invest more in preventive care so that we can avoid illness and disease in the first place. That starts with each of us taking more responsibility for our health and the health of our children. It means quitting smoking, going in for that mammogram or colon cancer screening. It means going for a run or hitting the gym, and raising our children to step away from the video games and spend more time playing outside.

Of course, there's been very little evidence that playing video games alone somehow leads kids to be less active or to play less outside, but it may also be worth putting this into a historical context. Tom sends in a look back at some old quotes from Scientific American, where the last one on the page, written in July of 1859 -- yes 150 years ago -- sounds quite similar to Obama's comments on video games, but is in reference to that pernicious child-obesity-causing monstrosity we call "chess":

"A pernicious excitement to learn and play chess has spread all over the country, and numerous clubs for practicing this game have been formed in cities and villages. Why should we regret this? It may be asked. We answer, chess is a mere amusement of a very inferior character, which robs the mind of valuable time that might be devoted to nobler acquirements, while it affords no benefit whatever to the body. Chess has acquired a high reputation as being a means to discipline the mind, but persons engaged in sedentary occupations should never practice this cheerless game; they require out-door exercises--not this sort of mental gladiatorship."

You heard them! No more chess playing, you kids!

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A former chemistry teacher of mine provided a great definition of "pyrophoric:"

[It] means that if you playfully squirt some at your lab mates, they will burst into flame.

In other (less amusing) words, a "pyrophoric" substance is one that ignites spontaneously on exposure to air.
Pyrophoric iron, however, isn't as dangerous as that makes it sound, especially in small quantities.

Basically, the oxidation of iron is so vigorous that it can cause very finely divided iron metal to become incandescent. Amazing Rust has a great tutorial on how to prepare finely divided iron by thermolyzing iron oxalate, a yellow powder that can, in turn, be prepared by a simple reaction between two common chemicals.

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Micron Technologies has announced the first flash memory cards to use its 34-nanometer process technology. Its subsidiary, Lexar, will incorporate the new 32Gb NAND chips into its 32GB Platinum II SDHC memory card. A 16Gb microSDHC card (commonly used in mobile devices), will also make use of the 34nm technology NAND chips. Lexar has said it will incorporate the technology into an increasing proportion of its flash memory card range.

Here are some of my recent posts about money for credit.com.

People are Easily Manipulated by Price of Goods, Except When They're Not: When people are told that a $10 bottle of wine costs $90, they'll report that it tastes better. When they're told a painkiller (actually a placebo) costs $2.50 per pill, they'll report less pain from electrical shocks than people who are given the same placebo but are told it costs ten cents.

Alarming Dashboard View of U.S. Debt: Watching the U.S. national debt, credit card debt, medical debt, and various entitlement liabilities skyrocket, I envisioned Uncle Sam at the gas pump, pouring greenbacks into a tank that we'll never be able to pay for when the bill comes.

Robo-call Rip-Offs: Patricia Poole of Mineral City, Ohio paid $695 to Mutual Consolidated Savings, which promised to "work with Poole’s creditors to get her interest rates lowered or eliminated." But after she paid the money, Poole says she never heard from anyone at Mutual Consolidated Savings.

Car Dealers' Tricks -- and How to Dodge Them: An especially dirty dealer trick is called "check ransoming." This is when a dealer asks you to write a check before a deal has been made to "prove to the manager you are serious." Then the check gets mysteriously "misplaced," putting you in an uncomfortable position that the dealer will use against you to close the deal against your better judgment.

Got a Plan to Reduce Your Credit Card Debt? Keep it to Yourself!: "Announcing your plans to others satisfies your self-identity just enough that you’re less motivated to do the hard work needed," writes Derek Sivers, the founder of CD Baby. "Once you’ve told people of your intentions, it gives you a 'premature sense of completeness.'"

Cheap, Good Food: Living on a budget sucks if you feel as though you are depriving yourself. The only way I'll be able to stick to a budget is if it's more fun than blowing the budget.

Executives at the New York Times managed to say they believed that publicity around the case of a journalist kidnapped in Afghanistan would make him more valuable to his captors, and increase odds that he would die in captivity. To this end, they worked with news organizations to enforce a news blackout on the case -- and they did the same with Wikipedia. Seriously, guys? There's a slippery slope for you.

A dozen times, user-editors posted word of the kidnapping on Wikipedia's page on Mr. Rohde, only to have it erased. Several times the page was frozen, preventing further editing -- a convoluted game of cat-and-mouse that clearly angered the people who were trying to spread the information of the kidnapping. Even so, details of his capture cropped up time and again, however briefly, showing how difficult it is to keep anything off the Internet -- even a sentence or two about a person who is not especially famous. The sanitizing was a team effort, led by Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia, along with Wikipedia administrators and people at The Times.

Keeping News of Kidnapping Off Wikipedia (NYT)

Michael writes "Part of our business at my work involves transferring mission critical files across a 2 mbit microwave connection, into a government-run telecommunications center with a very dodgy internal network and then finally to our own server inside the center. The computers at both ends run Windows. What sort of protocols or tools are available to me that will guarantee to get the data transferred across better than a straight Windows file system copy? Since before I started working here, they've been using FTP to upload the files, but many times the copied files are a few kilobytes smaller than the originals."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I've wanted to get into knifemaking since I was a teenager, but for years had been deterred by the belief that I first needed to buy a bunch of expensive equipment, like a 3-wheel belt grinder and an annealing oven. Then I found Wayne Goddard's $50 Knife Shop, which is a compilation of material originally prepared for Goddard's eponymous column in BLADE magazine. It kind of does for knifemaking what Dave Gingery's books did for foundrywork, going back to the historical fundamentals of the technology to get at what you really need to do good work. Goodies include homemade forges and anvils, homemade disc and belt grinders, scavenging steel for blades (including forging wire rope to make Damascus steel), finishing techniques, backyard heat treating, and a whole chapter on "tribal knifemaking," which is the modern art of making knives without using electricity. Fascinating stuff.

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Want to know just how incredibly confusing and impossible copyright law has become? Just take a look at this lawsuit, filed yesterday by some music publishing companies against Microsoft, Yahoo and Real Networks, claiming that the online music stores each of them runs (the Zune store, Yahoo Music and Rhapsody) infringe on trademarks (thanks Eric Goldman for sending this over). How can that be, you ask? Surely these companies properly licensed the music they offer in their streaming/download offerings, right? Well, the lawsuit doesn't provide that much in the way of detail (and I've spoken to a few copyright lawyers -- none of whom seem to agree with each other!), it sure looks like the claim is that Microsoft, Yahoo and Real may have licensed the copyrights on the recordings, but did not license the copyright on the compositions. It sounds like (though, again, the details are fuzzy) that the record labels did licensing deals with these music services, but publishers and labels are separate entities (even if the labels own many publishers), and the rights are separate.

It's pure speculation until more details come out, but one imagines that the licensing deals with the record labels included some sort of assurances that the publishing rights were covered as well -- and for songs whose publishing rights were covered by the major record labels, that's probably the case. But for songs where the publishing rights were owned by independent companies -- such as MCS Music America, the claim appears to be that the publishing rights were never cleared -- and thus, Microsoft, Yahoo and Real were streaming/downloading music to which they only held some of the rights. Yikes.

Most of the complaint details which songs were offered without (allegedly) having secured all the rights. And, of course, the publishers are claiming that every time a song was streamed or downloaded, it counts as a separate act of infringement. If the court agrees, this could represent a massive liability for Microsoft, Yahoo and Real, given the fines we all know can be issued over a single instance of infringement.

That said, this is yet another example of the convoluted house of cards that copyright has become. The idea that you can license a recording, but then need to get a separate license from a totally different party for the rights to the "underlying composition" (and don't get us started on the need to make sure you're covered for reproduction, distribution and performance rights -- three separate issues under copyright law), and you begin to get a sense of the problem. Basically, every time some new technology or innovation comes along, the copyright holders run to Congress to slap on another right, rather than actually innovating on the business model side. And on top of it, when new technologies like the internet come along, it's not at all clear which rights really apply and who controls/owns what rights. Suddenly, you have a massive mess for a company trying to do something as simple as let people listen to music. Just for that, you get a massive lawsuit like the following: It's the sort of system only a greedy copyright lawyer could love: it's designed not to incentivize creation (copyright's stated purpose) or to facilitate the distribution of content -- but instead designed for the exact opposite: to confuse and hinder (but to keep copyright lawyers quite busy and gainfully employed).

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Snip from a Harvard Business blog post by Umair Haque on the digital-age business lessons to be learned from Michael Jackson's death, and analysis of the purported revenue from his career over the last three decades:

Want to know why we have a zombieconomy? Because the beancounters killed the incentives to create real value.

Let's use MJ's tragic death as a mini case-study. $300 million over, for example, 25 years? That's $12 million a year.

I'm deliberately leaving out ads, endorsements, concerts, etc., to focus on the the structural problems in one industry: music.

If the world's biggest pop star only made $12 million a year from his recordings, why would anyone make serious music? Where did the rest of the money go? Why, straight into record labels' pockets. Did they make better music with it? Nope — they made Britney and Lady GaGa. And that's how they killed themselves: by underinvesting in quality, to rake in the take.

Wait a second — that sounds familiar. You can add back in the endorsements, etc. now — they only double the figure: to about $25 million.

If the world's biggest pop star only made $25 million a year in total, something's very, very wrong. Where's the rest of the money? Why can't a resource as scarce as the King of Pop capture more value?

Michael Jackson and the Zombieconomy (via Bob Lefsetz)

Rand Huck writes "Amazon.com has now added Rhode Island to its blacklist of affiliates in response to its proposed budget changes to enforce a tax on Internet sales, which includes commissions on their affiliate program by content providers based in Rhode Island. The first state to be blacklisted was North Carolina, for the same reason. If you go to a Rhode Island-based or North Carolina-based website that advertises Amazon.com goods as an affiliate, that website will no longer have the goods available because otherwise Amazon.com would be forced to pay sales tax to the State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations or the State of North Carolina. The state's rationale is, if someone clicks to buy a good from Amazon.com via a site based in Rhode Island, it's equivalent to buying a good from a brick and mortar chain store located in Rhode Island."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Elena Corchero designed this solar vintage-looking hand fan that functions as a portable light at night. Are we seeing a new niche in luxury goods emerging here? In her newly launched online boutique she also sells electronic toy construction kits and reflective lace (for safely biking in your fancy socks). Via Fashioning Technology.

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AaronParsons writes "An interesting NY Times article describes currently available programs for post-consumer electronics. One of the many interesting points in the article is that electronics manufacturers should be held responsible for recycling their products post-consumer: 'Maybe since they have some responsibility for the cleanup, it will motivate them to think about how you design for the environment and the commodity value at the end of the life.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

We've seen it in a few other places, but reader Don Gatza let's us know that Schaumburg, Illinois is the latest city to dump its redlight cameras. The city found that, despite promises to the contrary, the redlight cameras did not decrease accidents (not even the "t-bone" accidents that proponents of such cameras insist they help combat). The city claims that even though a single intersection generated 10,000 tickets and over a million in revenue in just a few months, it's going to drop the cameras, because "It was not our intent to use them as a revenue generator." If only other communities were so enlightened.

Of course, there was a second potential factor in the decision as well. Apparently pissed off ticket recipients had been complaining and promising to stop shopping at Schaumberg businesses -- leading local businesses to fear a loss in customers and revenue. Of course, this is the same thing that towns with notorious speed traps have found: people avoid going there, harming local businesses. Hopefully more local businesses start recognizing that giving out automated tickets that do nothing to improve safety also tend to harm local businesses as well. In the meantime, if officials want to improve safety in Schaumburg intersections, studies have shown that the best way to do so is rather simple: increase the timing of yellow lights, and then add a longer pause between one direction turning red, and the perpendicular traffic's lights turning green.

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MAKE contributor Steve Lodefink posted results from his Lumenlab Micro CNC's maiden voyage -

Lithophanes were a popular way to hide girlie pictures in the bottom a of gentleman's tea cup around the end of the 19th century. An image would be molded into the porcelain in the cup so that only when held up to a light would the picture be visible.
[...]
I "lithophaned" an image of a skull into a piece of corian. When viewed under normal front lighting, it sort of looks like a distorted C-3P0 face, but when held up to a light source, it is transformed into a skull.

Check out video of the 'skullithophanery' in process over @ Finkbuilt.

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Nikolaus Gradwohl, an Austrian MAKE subscriber, created a QR code of his mother's name that she can weave into the rugs she makes. Our very own Becky Stern was showing off her knitted QR code scarf at the Mini Maker Square at the Google I/O conference last month. She hadn't had much luck with getting phonecams to successfully scan the code before, but a number of people at the conference were able to read it.

QR-Code Carpet

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johndmartiniii writes "Farhad Manjoo has a review of Firefox 3.5 at Slate.com this week. From the article: 'Lately I've been worried about Firefox. Ever since its debut in 2004, the open-source Web browser has won acclaim for its speed, stability, and customizability. It eventually captured nearly a quarter of the market, an astonishing achievement for a project run by a nonprofit foundation. But recently Firefox seemed to go soft.' The worried tone in the beginning of the review gives way to excitement over the HTML5 features being implemented, saying that thus far Firefox 3.5 'offers the best implementation of the standard — and because it's the second-most-popular Web browser in the world, the new release is sure to prompt Web designers to create pages tailored to the Web's new language.'" The final version could be here at any time; Firefox 3.5 is still shown as a release candidate at Mozilla's home page.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

RickRussellTX writes "Comcast plans to offer 4 megabits/sec WiMAX services to customers in Portland, Oregon starting tomorrow. Branded as 'Comcast High-Speed 2go' and '4G,' the service will require a $44.99 per month subscription in addition to existing Comcast home service. For $69.99 they will offer a dual-mode card with access to both Comcast WiMAX and Sprint's national 3G wireless network. Future rollouts are planned for Chicago, Philadelphia, and Atlanta. Say what you will about Comcast (and I know many Slashdot readers have plenty to say about Comcast), this is a daring attempt to bypass entrenched cell phone companies with a direct-to-consumer wireless service."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Morgellon posted steps on publishing Arduino sensor readings to the web via Pachube -

I recently discovered Pachube and have just fell in love with it.
This is a video of my first Pachube project and what I've been able to do. I connected two light sensors to an Arduino. One sensor measure light levels in my room, the other measures light levels outside.
The Arduino is connected to a computer running Processing, and it forwards the sensor data to Pachube.

The process is quite straightforward, making related projects much more approachable - iPhone and Android web apps are icing on the cake!


More:

Realtime sensor network awaits your input ... or output

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Every time I write about Sources Go Direct, like clockwork, someone asks how will we get Woodward & Bernstein reporting without great reporters sniffing around for stories that bring down Presidents.

Never mind that it only happened once and hasn't happened since. Only Richard Nixon has been forced from office by the press (or anyone) and it turns out that had W&B not been sleuthing, the NYT had the story too, but they blew it. So it's possible that without W&B, Nixon would have remained in office. However it's hard to imagine that he could have been worse than Bush II, who the press of today did not bring down. (A fact the defenders of projournos never address.)

Anyway...

In the rebooted world, Deep Throat, the source, might go direct -- anonymously, using a proxy server, possibly -- and a Twitter account created for just such a purpose. BTW, I don't assume there won't be reporters in the rebooted world, but I do assume the sources will be able to go direct if they choose to. And in this case I don't see why they wouldn't.

If we're lucky enough to have a Woodstein out there digging, let's hope we have the sense to listen to them. And if we don't get blessed or if the economics of projourno crumbles, and Deep Throat wants us all to know how screwed the President is, let's make sure that anonymous pathways exist so they can say what they know and stay in place to keep reporting.

I write this from Berlin, a place that has seen huge change, many times, in the last 100 years. The kind of change that would make Americans weep with fear.

I have to admit, there was one part of the "Clear" airport "fast pass" program created by Stephen Brill that I never fully understood. In order to join Clear, you had to submit all sorts of personal info -- which raised a lot of questions when the company behind Clear, Verified Identity Pass, lost a laptop with all that data last year. But what's never been clear to me is why this data was needed. If you had a Clear card, it wasn't like you went through any less of a security check. You just got to cut the line. That's it. You still ended up needing to go through the same security check. So why did Verified Identity Pass -- or the Department of Homeland Security who VIP passed the data on to -- need your personal info in the first place?

Either way, that's now raising a lot more questions because no one seems entirely sure what happens to all that data now that the company has gone out of business. While the company insists that airport kiosks and employee computers are being wiped clean, there are still plenty of questions about just who still has access to the data, and what happens to it if someone else buy's up VIP's assets or if the company declares bankruptcy and creditors get access to their assets.

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paulraps writes "The Pirate Bay is to be bought for $7.8 million by Global Gaming Factory X, a Swedish company specializing in internet café management software, the company has announced. As well as taking over the controversial brand, GGF has also bought Peerialism, a small IT company with roots at Sweden's Royal Institute of Technology, which has developed a new file sharing technology. The acquisitions mean that GGF will be at the heart of 'the international digital distribution market,' allowing it to introduce a new pay model for file sharing." Reader pyzondar adds "However, the press statement also states that the deal will only go through 'if GGF and its Board of Directors can use the asset in a legal and appropriate way.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Uber-bender Pete Edwards of Casper Electronics shares his recipe for cooking up some tasty mods for Casio 'SA' series keyboards -

This is an engineered modification which works on most of the Casio SA series ( SA-1, SA-5, SA-7, SA-8 etc). There will be an Amplifier chip ( No AN8053 ) common across the SA series and a mask programmed CPU which will be made by OKI and have the part No M6387-xx where xx is the variant for the specific keyboard it is installed in, in the case of the SA-5 it is M6387-16. The different variant number accommodates different key / button layouts of the keyboard it is fitted into, the PCM sounds however remain the same. There are 5 interesting modifications that can be easily fitted:

1) Pitch Shifting
2) Power Crash
3) 5th's Switch
4) Glitch Randomizer
5) Filter/ Feedback Adjustment

Oodles more info + sound samples available of @ Casper.

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Not since industrial noisemakers like Einsturzende Neubauten first miked a shopping cart... This is a decidedly more 21st version. The makers, Hogan Birney, Sean Kinberger, and David Plakon explain the design:

Touch and pressure are used to control the live manipulation of sound and image. The cart is equipped with a video projector, computer and battery making it portable and self contained. Using a microprocessor (Arduino) and custom software (max/msp/jitter) to sense the users touch and translate the pressure of the users touch, a real-time response is created both visually and sonically. The cart is used by MPG performers and the audience is also encouraged to play the cart as well.

More about the Mobile Performance Group

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Dotnaught writes "Sony is now shipping computers in China with Green Dam installed, in advance of the Chinese government's July 1 deadline. But the company is disclaiming responsibility for any damage caused by the Web filtering software. Documents posted by Hong Kong-based media studies professor Rebecca MacKinnon also suggest that the Chinese government is considering similar filtering requirements for mobile phones."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Kevmag 2000 posted this YouTube vid of his transforming robot, apparently built for a robotics class. Pretty cool. I couldn't find out much else about it.

Kevmag 2000-Transforming Robot [Submitted by Chris Brent. Thanks, Chris!]

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Two separate stories crossed my desk recently, that both raise some interesting questions in today's internet age. The first was concerned about whether or not a newspaper in South Carolina violated any laws in publishing emails between South Carolina governor Mark Sanford and his supposed mistress in Argentina. The second story involves blog network Gawker which apparently published the private profile of an 11-year-old boy who supposedly was "snubbed" by actress Megan Fox, when trying to deliver a flower to her.

Both raise a lot of questions about definitions of "privacy" when it comes to today's socially networked and internet-connected world. It seems like there are numerous questions (and different jurisdictions and laws) that come into play in determining what is or is not a legal violation of privacy -- but if you're a lawyer who practices in this area, I would imagine that the next few years are going to be very busy ones. I'm not about to make a judgment call on either one at this point, but it would be fascinating for lawyers (and others) to chime in both on what they think from a legal standpoint and what they think from a "reasonable" standpoint.

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In the latest episode of the Canadian tech podcast Search Engine, Peter Van Loan, the new Public Safety minister, attempts to explain the Conservative government's approach to privacy on the internet. It's a remarkable piece of audio. It goes a little like this:

Search Engine: Here's some audio of your predecessor promising, on behalf of your party and your government, never to ever allow the police to wiretap the Internet without a warrant.

Minister (as though he had been off on another planet): We never promised not to do that.

Search Engine: What about all the personal information that you guys are now proposing to give to the cops without a warrant?

Minister (tragically unclear on the subject): We're not requiring ISPs to give out any personal information without a warrant, just your real name, your home address, your IP address, your home and cell number...

Search Engine: Huh. Well there's this really critical, high profile court ruling that calls all that stuff private information?

Minister (pretending he didn't hear): The courts have ruled that this isn't private information. Canadians have no legitimate expectation of privacy when they use the Internet, not when it comes to your name, address, cell phone number, etc

Search Engine: Do the cops really need to get this information without a warrant?

Minister: Oh yes. There are MONSTROUS BABY-EATING CHILD PORNOGRAPHERS WHO ADVERTISE THAT THEY ARE ABOUT TO SEXUALLY ASSAULT A LIVE CHILD IN TEN MINUTES and we need to be able to run down their IPs without talking to a judge first.

Search Engine: But when a child is endangered, the law already allows you to get this information without a warrant, right?

Minister: Why are you still asking questions? Didn't you hear me? BABY-EATING CHILD PORNOGRAPHERS! Surely that settles the matter.

Search Engine: Uh, I guess. Thanks anyway.

Search Engine: "No Expectation of Privacy"

MP3 link

Podcast feed

Cooliris has released the latest version of its image browsing plug-in. Version 1.11 allows the Cooliris 3D Wall to be used within a browser tab, enabling toggling between tabs of image walls. Users with Flickr accounts can now browse images complete with title, author, description and tags, and can choose to view their own sets and pools. It also supports MySpace, Facebook and other social networking websites.

Hugh Pickens writes "Cosmologist Adrian Mellott has an article in Seed Magazine discussing his search for the mechanism behind the mass extinctions in earth's history that seem to occur with a period of about 62 million years. Scientists have identified nearly 20 mass extinctions throughout the fossil record, including the end-Permian event about 250 million years ago that killed off about 95 percent of life on Earth. Mellott notes that as our solar system orbits the Milky Way's center, it oscillates through the galactic plane with a period of around 65 million years. 'The space between galaxies is not empty. It's actually full of rarefied hot gas,' says Mellott. 'As our galaxy falls into the Local Supercluster, it should disturb this gas and create a shock wave, like the bow shock of a jet plane,' generating cascades of high-energy subatomic particles and radiation called 'cosmic rays.' These effects could cause enhanced cloud formation and depletion of the ozone layer, killing off many small organisms at the base of the food chain and potentially leading to a population crash. So where is the earth now in the 62-million year extinction cycle? '[W]e are on the downside of biodiversity, a few million years from hitting bottom,' writes Mellott."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Details are a bit scarce at this point, but Martin alerts us to the news that The Pirate Bay has apparently been sold to a public company for 60 million SEK (about $8 million US) -- at least according to a press release from the supposed buyer, Global Gaming Factory X (GGF). Apparently it's 30 million SEK/$4 million in cash and another the rest in shares in GGF. The company claims the acquisition will be complete in August, and that it will "launch new business models that allow compensation to the content providers and copyright owners." Separately, it appears GGF is also buying another technology company, called Peerialism.

Apparently GGF operates internet cafes and gaming centers in Sweden, and also offers software for managing internet cafes as well.

I assume more details will be forthcoming soon (we'll update the post as necessary), but this raises a variety of questions -- in part about the ongoing lawsuit and the lingering jailterms for the four people who were on trial. Considering it was always quite amorphous who actually "owned" The Pirate Bay, it makes you wonder who sold it and who gets the money. Also, since the guys on trial insisted they actually didn't make much money from The Pirate Bay, they may actually be seen in a worse light after this news, suggesting that even if they didn't make money from ongoing operations, they may have cashed in on the sale. All in all, quite a surprise, and we look forward to additional details.

Update: Ok! Martin alerts us to the fact that Peter "brokep" Sunde has confirmed the deal and provided some details via a Twitter interview. Martin, helpfully, translates:

Daniel Goldberg:
@ brokep Is this correct? http://bit.ly/1YR0m

Peter S Kolmisoppi:
@ danielg0ldberg Yes.

Daniel Goldberg:
@ brokep What a thing! Who gets the money? Who owns the TPB?

Peter S Kolmisoppi:
@ danielg0ldberg Foreign company, with demands from our side to finance a fund for internet projects. We get no money.

Daniel Goldberg:
@ brokep Cool. What do you mean internet project? Will you not have to use the money to cover the damages?

Peter S Kolmisoppi:
@ danielg0ldberg Internet Project in the form of political activism, etc. TPB changed hands in 2006 already to not be sued.

Daniel Goldberg
@ brokep Congratulations, the scoop! Who is the owner of TPB today?

Peter S Kolmisoppi:
@ danielg0ldberg It's partly why we've have been so sure that lawsuits against us is pointless in the end ... :-)

Peter S Kolmisoppi:
@ danielg0ldberg I do not think that I may say for legal reasons. But they are people we trust. And have conditioned things too..

So... that answers some of the questions (and raises a few others!). The money is not going to these guys, but will go towards funding internet political activism. Also, apparently the official ownership of The Pirate Bay had been in the hands of others who are not clear.

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Kullin sez, "The publicly traded gaming company Global Gaming Factory X (GGF) has issued a press statement this morning that they will purchase the website the Pirate Bay and the company Peeralism that 'develops peerialistic solutions to transport and store data on the Internet'. According to Svenska Dagbladet, GGF will purchase the Pirate Bay for 60 MSEK [Ed: about US$7.8 million] [Ed: E.g., peanuts], out of at least half in cash, and Peeralism for 100 MSEK, out of which at least half in cash."

OK, that's weird.

Following the completion of the acquisitions, GGF intends to launch new business models that allow compensation to the content providers and copyright owners. The responsibility for, and operation of the site will be taken over by GGF in connection with closing of the transaction, which is scheduled for August 2009.

"We would like to introduce models which entail that content providers and copyright owners get paid for content that is downloaded via the site" said Hans Pandeya, CEO GGF.

"The Pirate Bay is a site that is among the top 100 most visited Internet sites in the world. However, in order to live on, The Pirate Bay requires a new business model, which satisfies the requirements and needs of all parties, content providers, broadband operators, end users, and the judiciary. Content creators and providers need to control their content and get paid for it. File sharers' need faster downloads and better quality" continues Hans Pandeya.

OK, that's kind of ominous and interesting.

Sounds more or less what the VCs who backed the original Napster were hoping for: buy the music industry's most hated, most successful enemy, then shop around to the industry and see if they'll give it a license and help it go legit. Ten years ago, the industry figured it would get a better deal by suing Napster into oblivion (they even tried to sue for the assets of the pension funds that backed the VCs that backed Napster!) and then buy it at firesale prices and run it themselves (except they ended up running it into obscurity by larding it with a bunch of junk that reflected wishful thinking about what the market would bear; meanwhile, competing rogue services took off and filled and expanded the niche Napster had occupied).

So here's the question: will Big Content learn from the Great Stupidity of 1999, or are they so emboldened by their domination of the legislative and judicial arms of the world's governments that they'll once again kill the most successful rogue operation and leave yet another niche for yet another group of even-less-cooperative rogues to fill?

Update:: Here's The Pirate Bay's Brokep on the subject:

TPB is being sold for a great bit underneath it's value if the money would be the interesting part. It's not. The interesting thing is that the right people with the right attitude and possibilities keep running the site. As all of you know, there's not been much news on the site for the past two-three years. It's the same site essentially. On the internets, stuff dies if it doesn't evolve. We don't want that to happen.

We've been working on this project for many years. It's time to invite more people into the project, in a way that is secure and safe for everybody. We need that, or the site will die. And letting TPB die is the last thing that is allowed to happen!

If the new owners will screw around with the site, nobody will keep using it. That's the biggest insurance one can have that the site will be run in the way that we all want to. And - you can now not only share files but shares with people. Everybody can indeed be the owner of The Pirate Bay now. That's awesome and will take the heat of us.

Listed company buys The Pirate Bay for 60 MSEK (Thanks, Kullin!)

The ARMmite PRO from the Maker Shed is a low-cost single board computer. It's perfect for small volume applications that require customization. The ARMmite PRO Features 21 TTL compatible digital I/Os shared with 7 10-bit A/D pins. Unleash the power of a 32-bit processor, running at 60 MHz to solve your control problem. Save time with built in support for PWM, SPI, 1-Wire, I2C, Pulse timing, Synchronous and Asynchronous serial protocols. Fully assembled, no soldering required!

More about the ARMmite PRO

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Disney's paying Hong Kong US$465M to expand the operations of the failing Hong Kong Disneyland, adding three new areas and 30 attractions (let's hope they finally add a Haunted Mansion!). I imagine the expansion will be on more "reclaimed" (e.g. landfill) territory.

As part of the deal announced Tuesday, the government plans to convert a substantial amount of existing loans to the park into equity, but won't invest any new capital. Its stake in the park will fall to 52%...

The physical size of the theme park, will increase by 23%, Lau said, with the new attractions aimed at broadening Disneyland's appeal to young adults...

In its first year of operations, visitors to Hong Kong Disneyland fell 400,000 short of the park's 5.6 million target. In its second year, attendance fell to just over 4 million visitors.

The park has also drawn criticism for lack of appeal to mainland Chinese tourists, who account for the bulk of its visitors, given their unfamiliarity with Disney stories and characters.

Disney said Tuesday the expansion will focus on "universally understood" stories, adding that many of the new attractions will be unique to the Hong Kong park.

Disney, Hong Kong Government Reach Deal To Expand Hong Kong Theme Park

(Image: 27601 - Hong Kong - Disneyland, a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike photo from Xiquinhosilva's Flickr stream)

It's 9:11AM as I write this, and back home in California, it's just after midnight. I've done this so many times, but it still seems something of a miracle. How a day can be starting and another day be ending, all at the same time.

Glad to see Scoble blogging again. I predict a return to blogging as people discover the power of being able to finish a thought, and to link to another site without going through an intermediary. Once again people will discover the power of Small Pieces, Loosely Joined.

Chris Anderson is right, of course -- and uses a device to bait the press to object. Good way to sell books, perhaps, but I'd rather he'd not taken the shortcut. Malcolm Gladwell objects, and my friend Howard Weaver says that while he thinks Gladwell isn't so bright, he's got it right this time. I don't agree. When you think of news as a business, except in very unusual circumstances, the sources never got paid. So the news was always free, it was the reporting of it that cost.

What Anderson calls "Free" -- we in Rebooting The News call Sources Go Direct. Absolutely nothing strange about it. The Internet always disintermediates. Did you see the "media" in the middle of that word? It's the middle that's hurt in the new world. Sorry. The new world pays the source, indirectly, and obviates the middleman.

Following up on yesterday's piece about Wikipedia, I wrote it, unintentionally, so that people reacted to the bit that's uncontroversial and missed the controversy. Of course it's good that the reporter escaped and his life was spared. Who could think otherwise.

Here's the controversy:

"What about when information on Wikipedia, true or not, hurts people in other ways? Why shouldn't anyone be able to get whatever they want redacted?"

Clearly some people can get stuff redacted sometimes.

Who, and under what circumstances?

Further, no one has that power over the web. Would it be better if Wikipedia worked like the web?

My friend Bob Rossney has a wonderful piece about Michael Jackson's death, one that made me consider MJ's career in a new light.

The saddest thing about Jackson was not just that his fame ruined him, it's that it continued ruining him even after he was essentially finished as an artist. In the last decade of his life he was no longer a great singer or a talented composer or a brilliant choreographer; he was someone who had once been all those things and was now Michael Jackson. Here was a guy whose entire existence from early childhood had been wrapped up with what happened when he did things that made other people happy and excited. And that was unavailable to him. He still could make people happy and excited by showing up and having his picture taken, but that's all he had left.

Someone on the WELL used a word about Jackson's probable history as a child molester that made me stop and think: "unforgiveable." It strikes me that it never even occurred to me whether or not to forgive Michael Jackson. In my mind, he was so far away from normative that the question of forgiveness seems totally irrelevant. Not that his no longer really being human in any meaningful sense justified his actions, or mitigated the harm he did, but that it makes no more sense to judge the morality of his actions than it would to judge Henry Darger's. Their creepiness, sure. But this was a man (it's a mark of how profoundly damaged Michael Jackson was that it feels strange to call him "a man", just as it feels strange to recognize that when he died he was older than the President of the United States) who spent every day of his life embedded in a matrix of perverse incentives. The terrain of his personal landscape was unrecognizable. I can understand the choices that my cat makes more deeply than I could understand the ones Jackson made.

Some thoughts on Michael Jackson (via Making Light)

An anonymous reader tips us that researchers at Toyota have developed a brain-machine interface system that allows for control of a wheelchair using thought. The system processes brain thought patterns (such as the thought of moving one's left foot) and can turn them into left, right, and forward movements of the wheelchair with a delay as short as one-eighth of a second. That's a big improvement over existing systems, which can take as long as several seconds to analyze and react to the user's thoughts. "The system has an emergency stop that can be activated by the user puffing his cheeks. The BMI adjusts itself over time to the characteristics of each driver's brainwaves. If a person dedicates three hours a day to using the system, the BMI can reach 95% accuracy in a week, researchers said."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

One of the things that gets people upset when we talk about advertising being content, and content being advertising is that they think this means advertisers tricking users into viewing their ads. That's not true at all. It should be totally upfront. People who pass along a cool commercial are doing it because they know exactly what it's advertising and they know that it's still cool. The idea is to create content that's so good that even though everyone knows it's advertising, they don't mind. If you have to "trick" people into viewing your ad, then it's bad content.

Witness, for example, this story from Wired, about a company advertising a "work from home" scheme. To advertise it, they built a series of fake news sites that look incredibly realistic -- just look at this example from a site called News5Alert or The Miami Gazette News, that look an awful lot like real news sites. As Karl notes, they even show that the "comments are closed due to spam."

But the whole thing is fake. It's really an ad. And, to make it worse, the company behind it is taking out ads on real news sites and trying to make it look like news -- thereby tricking people into reading their ad. The whole scam is to get people to sign up for info on how to make money from home -- for which they're charged $2... but then suddenly many claim they started finding additional "surprise" charges on their credit card, which the company says they actually agreed to in the fine print. That's an old scam, but using real-looking news articles is the new twist. So, while content is advertising, misleading or sneaky advertising is bad content.

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Gardner Dozois and Jonathan Strahan's new anthology The New Space Opera 2 came out today, featuring all original stories by me, John Scalzi, Robert Charles Wilson, Jay Lake, Garth Nix, Bruce Sterling, Elizabeth Moon, Justina Robson and many others. My story, "To Go Boldly," is a look at the LARPing ethic that lurks under the skin of any space navy.

The New Space Opera 2: All-new stories of science fiction adventure (via Scalzi)

QuarryGirl.com sent undercover agents to many of LA's vegan restaurants and ordered take-out food, spiriting it away on ice in sealed bags, then they conducted their own tests for trace amounts of animal products. Turns out that a lot of Thai vegan meat-substitutes are made with egg and other animal products (but seitan and tofu aren't). This kind of elaborate, science-based, complicated investigations into factual questions that matter intensely to small groups of people is one of the things that we mean when we say "citizen journalism."

Posing as owners of a new LA area vegetarian restaurant, we arrived at Bodhi and asked to speak with a customer service manager. We were quickly introduced to a helpful lady who was ready to advise us on what products to buy. She was either the manager or the owner, and most definitely the senior person on-premise at that time.

She showed us to a freezer of "veggie chicken", and we checked the ingredients on the label (all vegan). We asked her why some products have a better mouth texture than others, even though they have no eggs listed as ingredients, and after a long conversation and questions, she said the following:

"We buy most of this veggie meat from a manufacturer in Taiwan. It's produced for the Taiwanese and Chinese vegetarian market then re-labeled for export, often to the USA. I do know of times when things have been labelled incorrectly, but I do my best to make sure that what they send me is what they say it is."

Upon further questioning, she kindly gave us the email address of her contact in Taiwan. She specifically asked that we didn't mention Bodhi Vegetarian Supply when we contacted them, and so we're not disclosing the name of the manufacturer here.

laboratory tests of vegan restaurants in la (via Waxy)

Want to do something more meaningful for Iran's dissidents than turning your Twitter avatar green? EFF would like you to run a TOR bridge or relay, which will allow Iranians, and others around the world, to communicate with enhanced privacy and secrecy.

More sophisticated users can skip this paragraph, but for the rest, here's the basic outline. Tor (an acronym of "The Onion Router") is free and open source software that helps users remain anonymous on the Internet. Normally, when accessing websites, your computer asks for and receives a webpage out in the open, a process that exposes your IP address, the URL of the website, and the contents of the site, among other information to third parties. When accessing websites while using Tor, your computer essentially whispers its requests for a website, to another computer, which passes the request on to another computer, which passes it on to another computer, which passes it onto the computer where the website is hosted; the reply returns in the same, chain-message manner. The whispers are encrypted, so that neither outside authorities, nor the computers in the middle of the chain, can tell what is being said, and to whom. And the website itself does not have your IP address either.

Internet users in Iran are using Tor to both (a) circumvent censorship systems and (b) remain anonymous while reading and writing on the Internet. Both are critically important to the safety of protesters, many of whom fear retaliation from the government. Preliminary reports indicate that use of the Tor client in Iran has increased in the days after the contested election.

Whatever you think of Mousavi, I suspect that we all agree that Iranian citizens should be allowed to communicate without being spied upon by their governments (if only Americans enjoyed this right!).

Help Protesters in Iran: Run a Tor Bridge or a Tor Relay

Over on Boing Boing Gadgets, our Joel's spotted "Tourist Remover," a service that takes the stray tourists out of your shots of famous landmarks.

"Tourist Removed" is a web app that will remove other tourists from the photos you took of landmarks while on vacation as a tourist. All you have to do is take multiple shots of the same location, and Tourist Remover will only keep the bits that stay the same. It's like diff for photos!

"Tourist Remover" cleans up your vacation photos

Discuss this on Boing Boing Gadgets

The Chinese government has banned all forms of exchange between game economies and cash economies, including the extremely popular Chinese online games that involve buying and selling virtual goods with cash, as well as the infamous practice of gold farming (creating in-game wealth that is sold on to rich foreign players), a practice that is said to employ 400,000 people in China.

I've spoken to gold farm researchers in China, the UK and the US, and many believe that the gold farming industry is controlled by Chinese cartels that use language barriers to exclude others from the internal exchanges where gold from one server of a given game is exchanged for gold on another server. Of course, many people who speak Chinese live outside of the Great Firewall, but still, this might the chance that Indonesia and Vietnam (already outsource destinations for Chinese gold farming operations) as well as Eastern Europe to launch their own competing gold farming sector.

The ruling is likely to affect many of the more than 300 million Internet users in China, as well as those in other countries involved in virtual currency trading. In the context of online role playing games like World of Warcraft, virtual currency trading is often called gold farming.

The most popular form of virtual currency in China is called "QQ coins," a form of virtual credit issued by Tencent.com.

Tencent.com, which has about 220 million registered users -- about as many as Facebook -- is quoted in the Chinese government news release as "resolutely" supporting the new rule. The government justifies its ban on virtual currency trading as a way to curtail gambling and other illegal online activities.

The extent to which the Chinese government will apply its virtual currency rule to online role playing games remains unclear. A report in the English-language China Daily says that in-game gear is not considered virtual currency, so selling virtual items may be allowed to continue.

The trading of virtual currency for real cash employs hundreds of thousands of people worldwide and generates between $200 million and $1 billion annually, according to a 2008 survey conducted by Richard Heeks at the University of Manchester.

China Bans Gold Farming

The DM of the Rings is a webcomic that retells The Lord of the Rings as a D&D campaign played by a group of impatient, juvenile (and hilarious) gamers.

The DM of the Rings (via Neatorama)

Say your bike saddle's fabric/leather is wearing thin, or you just don't like the color. Or say you live in Phoenix and your black bike seat gets so hot while it's outside baking in the sun all day so that when you go to ride it, you get second degree burns. You might want to change the cover, and Instructables user djeucalyptus has just the tutorial for you. And me.

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It appears that L'Oreal just refuses to give up. The company has sued eBay in a bunch of different countries trying to get a court somewhere to admit that eBay is somehow liable for actions of its users. To date, it's been a clean shutout against L'Oreal, who has lost cases in Belgium, the UK and France (I believe cases are still pending in Germany and Spain, though it's hard to keep up). The ruling in France was the biggest surprise, given that French courts have ruled the other way in the past. Given that, it looks like L'Oreal isn't done yet on its home turf, as it's appealing the ruling in France. At some point, one would hope that L'Oreal would realize that going after eBay is targeting the wrong party, but it appears that no one at L'Oreal seems all that interested in actually understanding the issues, and wants to see how many shots it can get at making eBay pay up.

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fast66 writes "After hearing about Nokia-Siemens sale of Internet-monitoring software to Iran, US Senators Schumer and Graham want to bar them from receiving federal contracts. They planned the action after hearing about a joint venture of Nokia Corp. of Finland and Siemens AG of Germany that sold a sophisticated Internet-monitoring system to Iran in 2008. According to Nextgov.com, Schumer and Graham's bill would require the Obama administration to identify foreign companies that export sensitive technology to Iran and ban them from bidding on federal contracts, or renew expiring ones, unless they first stop exports to Iran."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

We've discussed in great detail how the current ACTA treaty has been mostly driven by corporate interests as a way to sneak in more draconian copyright laws through international treaty, rather than through legislative means. When consumer groups have requested a seat at the table, they've been rejected, even as industry lobbyists have had no problem being active participants in the process.

Now, a group called the Trans Atlantic Consumer Dialogue has demanded ACTA negotiations be put on hold until consumer groups have a real seat at the table, or at least are given access to documents being negotiated. TACD raises a number of important issues, such as respecting privacy rights and the rights of developing nations, who are often trampled over when it comes to IP protectionism from developed countries. But best of all, it points out one of the most annoying things in all efforts by copyright holders to extend copyright protection: they never, ever present any evidence for why it's necessary. It's an evidence-free zone. TACD specifically requests that real evidence be used:

Public policy on the enforcement of intellectual property rights should be informed by creditable evidence, transparent and realistic assumptions and objective peer reviewed analysis. Multiple approaches to addressing the legitimate concerns of right owners and consumers should be considered.

• Statistics on counterfeiting and or infringement must be objective, accurate, and presented in the appropriate context.
• Statistics on counterfeit and substandard medicines should not be combined when this misleads policy makers about the extent of either problem. The solutions to counterfeit and substandard products are often quite different.
• Estimates of losses from infringements of intellectual property rights should be based upon realistic demand and usage parameters.
• Governments should collect and analyze statistics on the relationship between infringement and affordability of products.

Here's TACD's full proposal:

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Michael Hickox's Lego Arcade stop motion animations are fantastic. Check the video at Boing Boing Offworld. "Video: 8-bit arcade classics are back, in Lego form"

Spotted over at Laughing Squid, this early 1980s D&D commercial featuring Jamie "Square Pegs" Gertz and Alan "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" Ruck.

Immutate and several other readers noted that Cablevision will be allowed to go ahead with deploying a remote-storage DVR system, when the US Supreme Court declined (without comment) to hear an appeal of a lower court ruling that went against movie studios and TV networks. (We discussed this case a few months back.) "Cable TV operators won a key legal battle against Hollywood studios and television networks on Monday as the Supreme Court declined to block a new digital video recording system that could make it even easier for viewers to bypass commercials. The justices declined to hear arguments on whether Cablevision Systems Corp.'s remote-storage DVR system would violate copyright laws. That allows the... company to proceed with plans to start deploying the technology this summer."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

We've covered a few different stories of companies that have been involved in what certainly has a lot of similarities to extortion: sending automated letters insisting that you're violating the law, and demanding payment to prevent a lawsuit. DirecTV was one of the first companies to put a big push behind such a revenue stream, but it was eventually shot down by the courts. The RIAA, of course, has used such a program for a while. More recently, we've seen some companies in Europe experiment with similar programs. The latest is Nexicon, a former cigarette retailer that's now rebuilt itself as an automated legal threat sender, scanning BitTorrent for what it believes is infringing content, and dashing off automated legal notices, demanding payment within 10 days, and suggesting that simply paying up is a lot cheaper than even contacting a lawyer. At what point do politicians realize just how badly the system is being abused? Or do they just let this sort of activity continue?

In the meantime, it looks like ACS:Law, which is one of the organizations that's been involved in a similar settle-or-we'll-sue letter sending campaign has been outed as sending bogus letters to people who had nothing to do with the content they're alleged to have infringed upon. The most amazing thing? The companies involved seem to admit it. In a letter used by multiple firms, they note that "We do not claim that your computer was used to commit the infringing act (although we do not exclude this possibility), nor do we claim that you downloaded our client's work. Our claim is that your Internet connection was used to make our client's work available via one or more P2P networks. The file may not, therefore, be on your computer." But they still want you to pay up, of course. It's guilty until proven innocent, because that's a lot more lucrative.

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Eric Goldman has the details on how Ascentive (a company that many in the tech community accuse of being a scam) has sued Google for removing Ascentive from Google's search index. There's a separate complaint about trademarks and AdWords on competitive ads, but that's an issue that's been covered so often, we'll ignore it in this case. Instead, what's interesting is the claim that Google removing Ascentive from its index is somehow a violation of Ascentive's rights. Of course, previous cases have shown that you have no legal right to have Google rank you where you think it's appropriate -- and if Google decides to remove you entirely, that's its prerogative.

Goldman notes that Ascentive's claim is a bit different than such claims in the past (but no more likely to get anywhere), noting that the refusal to list Ascentive's site is a trademark violation, because "consumers expect to see the trademark owner in organic search results for the trademark and therefore consumers will be actionably confused if the trademark owner doesn't appear there." Talk about twisting the intention of trademark law! It seems unlikely that such a claim gets very far, but it will be fun to see how the court responds to it.

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Flickr user rbreve has a CC-licensed set of snapshots that document the military coup in Honduras that occurred over the weekend. (via Ethan Zuckerman)

Shawn Schaffert's ratcheting scheduler

Real Time Operating Systems?

Even though this project is about a smart home dashboard that doesn't necessarily have any time-critical tasks, it very easily could. What if a cloud covered the solar panels, and I wanted to dim the lights in response. I don't want my software to wait for all the temperature sensors to finish updated before changing the lighting. To avoid this potential problem, I want a "Real Time Operating System" for my project.

Systems using embedded controllers are often characterized by the need to exhibit real-time computing behavior. It's important to understand what this means and how it affects the choice of software to use in a project. No one would argue that computers have been getting faster and faster over the years. Hard drive, memory, video card, and motherboard speeds and clock rates have been steadily increasing with each new generation of hardware. This has meant that the user can run complex applications without having to wait unreasonable amounts of time, and that simple applications perform their functions in vanishingly small time increments. For most desktop applications, small delays in program execution are unnoticeable and insignificant. But what if part of your application monitors the emergency-stop button for your home-built CNC milling machine? You need the emergency-stop button to shut the machine down within a guaranteed amount of time. Not having this determinism could create a very dangerous situation if, say, a background task like playing music or saving a file have momentarily taken over the computer bandwidth. You press and release the emergency-stop and watch in horror as your mill bit keeps going right through your part.

It doesn't take a powerful or fast CPU to give a timely response to a single bit change in a peripheral I/O register. Anyone who has programmed a port interrupt in a simple 8-bit microcontroller can figure out how long it will take for the 8-bit processor to capture the I/O interrupt and call the code to respond to the event. With PC operating systems like OSX, Windows, and Linux, there is some ability to implement "real-time" threads, but this capability is often implemented by overriding the operating system's normal behavior by using an operating system add-on to achieve this capability. These operating systems were designed to be effective general purpose tools for running a wide variety of applications and interacting with numerous third-party hardware devices, but they were not designed to have real-time, deterministic behavior.

A true real-time operating system (RTOS) is designed with features such that a program can be split into tasks which run on a fixed schedule, and asynchronous events, such as the CNC mill emergency-stop button press, will have a guaranteed maximum latency before they execute. You can write a program to toggle one I/O pin at 5 kHz and another at 1 kHz with minimal jitter, or program the emergency stop button response to shut off your CNC mill motors within a guaranteed 1 millisecond.

Check out a list of real time operating systems and find out about Windows Embedded CE 6.0 R2 here.

---

This SPARK Your Imagination Make: Windows Embedded project series is sponsored by Microsoft Corporation.

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Interested in placing a Classified ad in Make: Volume 19? Email classifieds@makezine.com for more information. Time is running out, and your ad must be placed by 11:59pm PDT on Wednesday, July 1st. One lucky reader will win a 4-line classified ad in Make: Volume 19 ($160 value) by emailing classifieds@makezine and inquiring about advertising in our Classified section. The winner will be notified Thursday morning, and if the winner already paid for an ad, he/she will be credited.

Got something cool you want to sell, have a service to offer fellow readers, looking for some precious widget that only another maker might have stashed away in the garage? The Make: MINImarketplace offers a place for you to reach the maker community for a very reasonable price.

MINImarketplace Classified Ad Specs:
Ads are $40 per line
40 characters per line
Minimum 4 lines, Maximum 16 lines

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selven ws one of several readers to send in the news that Bernie Madoff was sentenced to 150 years in prison. "Bernard Madoff's victims gasped and cheered when he was sentenced to 150 years in prison, but they walked away knowing little more about how he carried out the biggest robbery in Wall Street history. In one of the most dramatic courtroom conclusions to a corporate fraud case, the 71-year-old swindler was unemotional as he was berated by distraught investors during the 90-minute proceeding. Many former clients had hoped he would shed more light on his crime and explain why he victimized so many for so long. But he did not. Madoff called his crime 'an error of judgment' and his 'failure,' reiterating previous statements that he alone was responsible for the $65 billion investment fraud. His victims said they did not hear much new from Madoff in his five-minute statement. They also said they did not believe anything he said. As he handed down the maximum penalty allowed, US District Judge Denny Chin... [said], 'I simply do not get the sense that Mr. Madoff has done all that he could or told all that he knows.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

AI writes with a story from the NY Times about a 7-month-long effort, largely successful, to keep news of a Times reporter's kidnapping off of Wikipedia. The Christian Science Monitor, the reporter David Rohde's previous employer, takes a harder look at the issues of censorship and news blackout, linking to several blogs critical of Wikipedia's actions. Rohde escaped from a Taliban compound, along with his translator, on Saturday. "For seven months, The New York Times managed to keep out of the news the fact that one of its reporters, David Rohde, had been kidnapped by the Taliban. But that was pretty straightforward compared with keeping it off Wikipedia. ... A dozen times, user-editors posted word of the kidnapping on Wikipedia's page on Mr. Rohde, only to have it erased. Several times the page was frozen, preventing further editing — a convoluted game of cat-and-mouse that clearly angered the people who were trying to spread the information of the kidnapping... The sanitizing was a team effort, led by Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia, along with Wikipedia administrators and people at The Times."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It seems like it's become the "in thing" in the recording industry these days to "admit" that suing Napster, rather than working out a deal, was a "mistake" ten years ago. Of course, plenty of folks were telling them this at the time, but we were brushed aside as wackos who just wanted free stuff. The latest to make this claim is BPI's Geoff Taylor, who says he "regrets" that the industry didn't move faster to embrace online music. But, of course, Taylor and others still don't get it. They still want ISPs to police users. They still claim that piracy is a legal problem, and they still seem to get the facts wrong. Taylor claims: "There is simply no getting around the fact that billions of illegal free downloads of music every year in the UK mean that significantly less money is coming into the music ecosystem."

Except... that's not true at all. As a recent Harvard study showed, the amount of money going into the "music ecosystem" has grown -- tremendously. The only thing that's dropping is the sale of plastic discs.

In the meantime, considering BPI and others were so incredibly wrong 10 years ago, and they're only willing to admit it now, why is it that they think everyone should trust them now -- and that those of us who were actually right 10 years ago should still be brushed off as wackos who just want stuff for free? Perhaps it's time to start actually listening to those who have been pointing out new ways to embrace what consumers want to do with music in order to make more money. Otherwise, we'll be seeing the same thing in another 10 years, about how BPI's Geoff Taylor (or whoever replaces him) made a mistake trying to shut down The Pirate Bay.

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Al writes "The Mozilla foundation is to adopt a new standard to help web site's prevent cross site scripting attacks (XSS). The standard, called Content Security Policy, will let a website specify what Internet domains are allowed to host the scripts that run on its pages. This breaks with Web browsers' tradition of treating all scripts the same way by requiring that websites put their scripts in separate files and explicitly state which domains are allowed to run the scripts. The Mozilla Foundation selected the implementation because it allows sites to choose whether to adopt the restrictions. 'The severity of the XSS problem in the wild and the cost of implementing CSP as a mitigation are open to interpretation by individual sites,' Brandon Sterne, security program manager for Mozilla, wrote on the Mozilla Security Blog. 'If the cost versus benefit doesn't make sense for some site, they're free to keep doing business as usual.'

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

We've covered these beer can stoves before, but this is a particularly nice one. And 'tis the season to be camping...

Penny Stove Instructions and FAQ [Thanks, Pete Marchetto!]

More:
Make a Pepsi Can Stove
A better soda can stove

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Last week, we wrote about Judge Posner's troubling idea that copyright law should be changed to protect newspapers, and this week, a columnist for the Cleveland Plain Dealer is backing the same basic idea as proposed by two brothers, David and Daniel Marburger. One is a First Amendment lawyer and the other an economist -- and I'm stunned that both would get things so backwards. Their specific proposal is that:

• Aggregators would reimburse newspapers for ad revenues associated with their news reports.
• Injunctions would bar aggregators' profiting from newspapers' content for the first 24 hours after stories are posted.

Both are incredibly shortsighted and backwards and would do significantly more harm than good. Both are based on a fundamental misunderstanding of how news and the internet works. Even more amusing? They try to "anticipate the rebuttal" and get that totally wrong, claiming that people will complain: "Newspapers want to monopolize the truth."

No. That's not the complaint at all. The problem is much more basic than that. It's that newspapers (and the Marburgers, apparently) are confused about how people communicate and what business they're in. They think -- incorrectly -- that newspapers are in the business of delivering the news. But that's just a small part of it. They're really in the business of building a community of folks, who they then sell to advertisers. As such, they need to be doing two things, both of which this plan makes harder:

• They need to provide more value to their community, so they stick around
• They need to attract more people to their community

Now go back and look at the Marburgers' plan, and realize how backwards it is. It takes away value from the community by making it harder for those in the community to share and spread the news themselves -- a vital part of how people interact with the news these days. And just how do you define an "aggregator"? If someone Twitters a link to a news story... does Twitter become an aggregator? On top of that, barring others from "profiting" off the news for 24 hours simply limits the ability of others to help newspapers get more traffic.

Of course, in the meantime, Jay Rosen points us to Josh Young's analysis of what would almost certainly happen if newspapers could block others from linking to them. It's essentially what we've suggested in the past: if you give short-sighted and clueless newspapers the tools to block others from sending them traffic, that just opens wide the market for their smarter competitors to gladly accept all that traffic. Hell, it appears that Reuters recognizes the future. The folks there must be salivating over the idea that others would lock up their content and leave the playing field wide open to Reuters to scoop up all that traffic.

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KentuckyFC writes "The density of magnetic memory depends on the size of the magnetic domains used to store bits. The current state-of-the-art uses cobalt-based grains some 8nm across, each containing about 50,000 atoms. Materials scientists think they can shrink the grains to 15,000 atoms but any smaller than that and the crystal structure of the grains is lost. That's a problem because the cobalt has to be arranged in a hexagonal close packing structure to ensure the stability of its magnetic field. Otherwise the field can spontaneously reverse and the data is lost. Now a group of German physicists say they can trick a pair of cobalt atoms into thinking they are in a hexagonal close packing structure by bonding them to a hexagonal carbon ring such as graphene or benzene. That's handy because the magnetic field associated with cobalt dimers is calculated to be far more stable than the field in a cobalt grain. And graphene and benzene rings are only 0.5 nm across, a size that could allow an increase in memory density of three orders of magnitude."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Sometimes, I really wonder if companies think their users are stupid. There are times when they treat them that way. My favorite examples are when companies are taking away features or raising prices, and claiming (somehow) that it's for the benefit of those customers/users. For example, when eMusic raised prices and disabled features it put up a blog post trying to spin it as a positive, claiming "more of the good stuff!" Yes, at a higher price, with fewer features, but why let that get in the way of claiming good news?

The latest example is online music streaming site imeem. The company has struggled of late under absolutely draconian terms forced on it by the record labels. Rumors held that the company came close to going out of business until Warner Music agreed to renegotiate its suffocating deal. Still, there are many who question how the company can survive without a drastic change in business models. But, taking away features from customers with little warning and pretending it's a good thing isn't exactly the best way to go about things. Clay Shirky points us to the news that imeem is removing features for users to upload videos or pictures without even offering a "download to save" option. But, even worse, the blog post announcing the change tries to play this up as good news again, saying that it's all about "simplifying imeem" as part of an effort to enhance the site.

Sure, simplifying a site can be a good thing -- but unilaterally removing features that people use, with little warning, isn't really simplifying. You can simplify without removing features. If you have to remove features, for whatever reason, why not at least admit the truth: it's not for consumer's benefit, but for some other reason, and you realize it sucks for many users.

In other words, sound human, rather acting like your users are morons. If you want to see a company that's actually done a good job of this, look at Hulu. While we think it's ridiculous that the company caved in to content providers and tried (and failed) to block a specific browser (Boxee) from viewing its content, at least Hulu's CEO was upfront and honest about the fact that it sucked:

The maddening part of writing this blog entry is that we realize that there is no immediate win here for users. Please know that we take very seriously our role of representing users such that we are able to provide more and more content in more and more ways over time. We embrace this activity in ways that respect content owners' -- and even the entire industry's -- challenges to create great content that users love. Yes, it's a complex matter. A tough mission, and a never-ending one, but one we are passionately committed to.

For those Boxee users reading this post, we understand and appreciate that you're likely to tell us that we're nuts. Please know that we do share the same interests and won't stop innovating in support of the bigger mission.

eMusic, imeem and others would be wise to take note. Taking features away and pretending your customers are stupid enough to believe it's for their benefit isn't likely to fly.

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snydeq writes "Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister questions whether the 'hacker ethic' synonymous with computer programing in American society is enough for developers to succeed in today's economy. To be sure, self-taught 'cowboy coders' — the hallmark of today's programming generation in America — are technically proficient, McAllister writes, 'but their code is less likely to be maintainable in the long term, and they're less likely to conform to organizational development processes and coding standards.' And though HTC's Vineet Nayar's proclamation that American programmers are 'unemployable' is overblown, there may be wisdom in offering a new kind of computer engineering degree targeted toward the student who is more interested in succeeding in industry than exploring computing theory. 'American software development managers often complain that Indian programmers are too literal-minded,' McAllister writes, but perhaps Americans have swung the pendulum too far in the other direction. In other words, are we 'too in love with the hacker ideal of the 1980s to produce programmers who are truly prepared for today's real-life business environment?'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In March I pointed to an LA Times story about people in Colorado who were breaking the law by collecting and saving rainwater from their roofs to water their gardens during dry spells.

Holstrom's violation is the fancifully painted 55-gallon buckets underneath the gutters of her farmhouse on a mesa 15 miles from the resort town of Telluride. The barrels catch rain and snowmelt, which Holstrom uses to irrigate the small vegetable garden she and her husband maintain.

But according to the state of Colorado, the rain that falls on Holstrom's property is not hers to keep. It should be allowed to fall to the ground and flow unimpeded into surrounding creeks and streams, the law states, to become the property of farmers, ranchers, developers and water agencies that have bought the rights to those waterways.

But the NY Times reports that Colorado passed a couple of laws to make this practice legal.

A study in 2007 proved crucial to convincing Colorado lawmakers that rain catching would not rob water owners of their rights. It found that in an average year, 97 percent of the precipitation that fell in Douglas County, near Denver, never got anywhere near a stream. The water evaporated or was used by plants.

But the deeper questions about rain are what really gnawed at rain harvesters like Todd S. Anderson, a small-scale farmer just east of Durango. Mr. Anderson said catching rain was not just thrifty — he is so water conscious that he has not washed his truck in five years — but also morally correct because it used water that would otherwise be pumped from the ground.

It’s Now Legal to Catch a Raindrop in Colorado

This amazing machine transfers boats between the Forth and Clyde and Union Canals of central Scotland, which are some 80 feet apart vertically. It was opened in 2002. Gareth wrote last year about artist Andy Scott's proposal to install a pair of titanic mythical sea-horse heads as part of the lock mechanism below the wheel. Via Neatorama.

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Even with the 20% discount Amazon has for R. Crumb's Sex Obsessions, I can't afford it. Retail price is $700.

Randy Robert: Crumb's secret fantasies revealed

They have little to do with the standard procreative urge, Mr. Crumb admits. He has also said he finds nothing more boring than someone else's sexual obsessions, and yet through his long career the world's most famous underground cartoonist has felt compelled to include his own sex fantasies in his art. He explains it as a compulsive catharsis, while fans call R. Crumb's erotic fantasies the Master at his best. Now Crumb has selected his most intimately revealing comic strips and single page drawings to create a 256 page encyclopedic trip through his sexual psyche. All images were created between 1980 and 2006, and all strips are colored for a lush vibrancy never seen in his comic books. In total the book features 14 complete stories, including My Troubles With Women II, If I Were a King, A Bitchin' Bod and How To Have Fun With a Strong Girl, as well as 62 single page drawings.

This signed, slipcased, limited edition of 1,000 copies is a work of art in itself, with every part of the book--case, front and back covers, spine, introduction and pre-introduction pages--created for this project by Robert Crumb. Each book also comes with a print on mould-made age-resistant hahnemuehle paper pulled from an original watercolor by Robert Crumb.

The artist admits it's a little scary to see his most fevered obsessions collected and to end like this, but fans will find R. Crumb's Sex Obsessions a fascinating peek inside an often tortured, always brilliantly talented mind, as well as an unparalleled collector's item.

R. Crumb's Sex Obsessions

The Mega Lithium BackPack is an Open Source Hardware battery shield for the Arduino Mega that snaps to the back of the board, and provides around 15-27 hours of battery power to circuits built with the Arduino Mega (depending on the circuit). It gives a 3.3 volt, 5 volt, ground, and battery capacity testing signal that can be plugged into the Analog input port to test how much battery power is left.

The BackPack sells for $48.

Introducing the Mega BackPack, a battery for the Arduino Mega

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Hugh Pickens writes "Findings of a new study show that underweight people and those who are extremely obese die earlier than people of normal weight — but those who are only a little overweight actually live longer than people of normal weight. 'It's not surprising that extreme underweight and extreme obesity increase the risk of dying, but it is surprising that carrying a little extra weight may give people a longevity advantage,' said one of the coauthors of the study. 'It may be that a few extra pounds actually protect older people as their health declines, but that doesn't mean that people in the normal weight range should try to put on a few pounds.' The study examined the relationship between body mass index and death among 11,326 adults in Canada over a 12-year period. The study showed that underweight people were 70 percent more likely than people of normal weight to die, and extremely obese people were 36 percent more likely to die. But overweight individuals defined as a body mass index of 25 to 29.9 were 17 percent less likely to die than people of a normal weight defined as a BMI of 18.5 to 24.9. The relative risk for obese people was nearly the same as for people of normal weight. The authors controlled for factors such as age, sex, physical activity, and smoking. 'Overweight may not be the problem we thought it was,' said Dr. David H. Feeny, a senior investigator at Kaiser Permanente Center for Health Research. 'Overweight was protective.'"

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