hansamurai writes "Left 4 Dead 2 has been announced at E3, and a trailer for the game has surfaced. It will be released November 17, 2009, just a year after the first game. Gameplay changes include a new focus on melee weapons, especially the iconic anti-zombie weapon, the chainsaw. The cast of characters is brand new, but the plot appears to take place during the same zombie outbreak." The game is being developed for the PC and Xbox 360, and Valve says it will make use of a new version of their AI engine, which has the ability to "procedurally change weather effects, world objects, and pathways in addition to tailoring the enemy population, effects, and sounds to match the players' performance." Rock, Paper, Shotgun got the chance to do a hands-on preview, providing details about the gameplay and confirming that "it's a coherent new imagining of the game, this time bigger, smarter, and far more elaborate. Oh, and gloriously more gory."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Howard Knopf, a well known Canadian copyright expert, recently took a look at some of the failed copyright levy proposals in Canada. The Canadian Private Copying Collective (CPCC) administers the tax levy on blank CDs, which now accounts for almost 90% of the price. In 2002, similar proposals to extend the levy to DVDs and digital audio players were shot down. It's a good thing they were! Knopf notes that the $2.27 levy proposed in 2002 is now about 10 times the retail price of a blank DVD, and the $21/GB levy proposed for digital audio players would have left a 120 GB iPod (<$300 CAD) with a $2520 tax. You might think the CPCC would have decreased the levies over time, but the blank CD levy was just increased this past December (blank CDs cost more in Canada than blank DVDs). Even if the levies were lowered, it would be because they had already become unbearable. Imagine the bureaucracy and battles at the Copyright Board, and imagine the effect on Canadian consumers, tech companies in the meantime (what if the Blackberry was classified as a digital audio device?).

The point is that these quick solutions aren't solutions at all. Setting up "you're a criminal" taxes to collect money for companies that can't figure out how to adjust their business models is bound to block innovative new technologies, and you can't predict what technologies will drive new business models. As Knopf puts it, "all of this shows that today's quickie proposed legislative solutions and oft inflated tariff proposals to deal with supposedly serious crises arising from copyright and new technology are potentially tomorrows' absurdities or even nightmares."

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

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xzvf alerts us to big news on the patent front: the Supreme Court decided today to review the validity "business method" patents. In particular, the Supremes will look over the "In re: Bilsky" case, which we have discussed before. "By agreeing to weigh in on the case, the high court is venturing into controversial terrain. Critics of business-method patents say it was never the intent of the law to protect such things, which in their view are often far closer to abstract concepts or mathematical algorithms rather than physical inventions. Proponents say they are key to promoting innovation in today's knowledge- and service-based economy. ... The court's decision to review the Bilski case caught many observers by surprise. The Bilski patent claims are widely viewed as vulnerable to challenge on a number of grounds, and the sense among some experts was it would make a poor test case. ... The Supreme Court won't hear arguments in Bilski until its next term, which begins in October. A ruling is likely during the first half of 2010."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

At Maker Faire, Jared Boone, of ShareBrained, premiered the Make: television jukebox. Fairgoers could plug in a thumbdrive, press a button, and have the selected episode loaded onto their USB drive. Here, Jared talks to Make: television's John Edgar Park about the project.

More:
Make: television Vending Machine

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Need cash? Got a gold grill taking up unnecessary space in your mouth? SellYourGoldTeeth.com is a single-page site representing a buyer of teeth, caps, and crowns. (Thanks, Syd Garon and Greg Long!)

quintin3265 writes "At today's Electronic Entertainment Expo press briefing, Microsoft unveiled Project Natal, a technology that eliminates the controller from gaming on the Xbox 360. In one demo, a player used her arms and legs to hit balls in an attempt to destroy a brick wall, and in another game, an employee threw virtual "paint" on a canvas to create a painting, even drawing an elephant using a silhouette feature. An accompanying video also demonstrated automatic login using facial recognition, videoconferencing with other Xbox Live members, and participating in a gameshow against another family through the Internet using speech recognition."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

BBG's Joel spotted a site that will print any photo on a shower curtain. I would go with a still from the Psycho shower scene.

A whole bunch of people have been sending in the story of a guy named Tim Langdell, who claims to own the trademark to the word "edge" when its used in the name of any video game, and has used that to force a popular iPhone game, called EDGE, out of the app store. As the article points out, Langdell's last game was released in 1994, which makes you wonder if the name is still being used in commerce (a requirement for a trademark claim). And, of course, there's the question of confusion. Considering how few people have heard of Langdell's company, was there really any chance that "a moron in a hurry" would confuse a fun block game with Langdell's title's like "Snoopy: The Case of the Missing Blanket." Kotaku points out that Langdell appears to spend a lot more time these days talking to people about how he owns the word "edge" in any video game than producing or selling video games...

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The Yellow Treehouse Cafe is built around a redwood tree near Auckland, New Zealand. It was designed by Pacific Environment Architects as part of a marketing campaign for the area's yellow pages. It's no longer open for dinner but will be available for party rentals. Yellow Treehouse (Thanks, Lindsay Tiemeyer!)

One of my personal high points at Maker Faire was being presented with this custom-made Solarbotics HexPummer Lantern by Dave Hyrnkiw of Solarbotics. I was really touched. The gift encodes tons of meaning for me. I've known the Solarbotics folks since the "radio days" of cyberspace. They were one of the first e-commerce sites around, one of the first mom and pop kit shops, one of the first tech kit/small parts etailers to create a user-community where builders could share their creations. The first BEAM bot I ever built was their SolarSpeeder 1.0 kit. Dave was on a robotics panel I hosted at the Faire and I didn't get a chance during that discussion to get his historical perspective on the growth of the small-kit DIY industry. I was planning on quoting that country western song: "I was country when country wasn't cool." Well, Solarbotics was maker when maker wasn't cool. In many ways, Dave and Cheryl wrote the playbook from which we're all now working. (Oh, and pummers are one of my favorite robo-critters in the BEAM taxonomy.)

The lantern image on the left is a cartoon of me, done by artist and MAKE editor-in-chief Mark Frauenfelder for Leo Laprorte's and my TiVo hacking book. The one on the right is Mousey the Junkbot, my project to turn a computer mouse into a light-seeking robot (using the Herbie circuit I stole from Dave's Junkbots, Bugbots & Bots on Wheels).

More:

• Make Mousey The Junkbot - Make: Video Podcast
• Pummer, Dude!
• Gorgeous pummer

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Gama-Go's Greg Long says:

Dave Cooper's one of my most favorite artists ever. He just did this unbelievably awesome video for one of my most favorite bands ever, Danko Jones. Check it and be thrilled.

These Star Wars Lucha Libre Masks are available for your printing (and pummeling) over at StarWars.com:

Ever wonder what it would be like to see a tag-team wrestling match with Darth Vader and Darth Maul against Boba Fett and General Grievous? We do too, and better yet, they should be wearing Lucha Libre (Mexican wrestling) masks!

Star Wars Lucha Libre Masks (Thanks, Mark Dery!)

Mike writes "Google's latest decision to try its hand selling eBooks promises to make life in the eBook world more interesting, and will likely spur a standards war that in the end may prove beneficial to many consumers. Google's eBook store will pit it directly against Amazon and Amazon's Kindle — an enormously popular eBook reader. This will push many companies to create eBook readers to take advantage of Google's new store, and will flood the market with tough choices. Google does not have a dedicated eBook reader yet, but it seems a logical next step for the search giant."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

David Lynch has started a project to interview people and post a video every three days for a year.

Jess was our first interview. We found him sitting on the side of the road during the middle of the day. He told us he was waiting for his trailer to be repaired so he could go live alone in the desert. Although hesitant at first, Jess agreed to spare a bit of his time and talk to us. His rugged delivery and appearance soon gave way to a gentle man who was just looking for some peace in his life. After leaving Jess we headed further easy into Arizona to look for our next interview.

David Lynch's Interview Project begins today

Microsoft had a killer day today, revealing all sorts of updates to the Xbox 360, including full retail game downloads, 1080p live streaming of movies and TVs, and most notably "Project Natal", an attempt to beat the Nintendo Wii at its own game by creating a virtual reality interface that doesn't use control hardware at all, but instead does real-time motion capture using an array of cameras. It actually looks pretty amazing. Brandon's got everything you need to know, including video, over at Offworld.

Advance Patrol was one of the bands used by the prosecution in The Pirate Bay trial as an example of a band harmed by The Pirate Bay. Except... apparently the band didn't think so. Isak sends in the news that the band has released its latest album on The Pirate Bay, with a message saying how they love The Pirate Bay:

The hiphop group known as Advance Patrol hereby release its new album on The Pirate Bay today. They do so to spread their music to as many as possible, and at the same time discredit the prosecution against The Pirate Bay, a prosecution where Advanced Patrol has been used as a weapon in the circus around the court proceedings....

We never asked to be plaintiffs in this case, Gonza from Advance Patrol explains, they used us as a weapon in a fight in which we don't wish to participate. We refuse to be used in a war against our fans!

You cannot legislate away file sharing, Gonza says. Those who share our music are also those who appreciate it the most. They are my friends, and friendship is something to be valued highly. That's why we're giving away El Futuro to the internet, to our friends.

Once again, the further this goes on, the worse and worse the lawsuit looks for the entertainment industry...

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guruevi writes with news that a process using an ultra-powerful laser can crank up the efficiency of everyday incandescent light bulbs. Using the same laser process covered several years ago, the tungsten filament has an array of nano- and micro-scale structures formed on the surface making the resulting light as bright as a 100-watt bulb while consuming less electricity than a 60-watt bulb and remaining much cheaper to produce. "The key to creating the super-filament is an ultra-brief, ultra-intense beam of light called a femtosecond laser pulse. The laser burst lasts only a few quadrillionths of a second. To get a grasp of that kind of speed, consider that a femtosecond is to a second what a second is to about 32 million years. During its brief burst, Guo's laser unleashes as much power as the entire grid of North America onto a spot the size of a needle point. That intense blast forces the surface of the metal to form nanostructures and microstructures that dramatically alter how efficiently light can radiate from the filament."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Tech and culture jammers monochrom were selling this awesome T-shirt at Maker Faire.

New monochrom shirt: "Slacking is killing the DIY industry"

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Michael Leddy of Orange Crate Art writes:

Some enterprising readers (faculty? student-journalists?) have gone through the dissertations of Carl Boening and William Meehan, highlighting every passage in Meehan's that can be found, word for word, in Boening's. Neither the University of Alabama (which granted Boening and Meehan their doctorates) nor Jacksonville State University, where Meehan is president, has chosen to take up the obvious questions about plagiarism that Meehan's dissertation presents. As another recent story suggests, plagiarism seems to be governed by a sliding scale, with consequences lessening as the wrongdoer's status rises.

What plagiarism looks like

Last week we held a contest for the best zombie-themed haiku. It was very hard choosing a favorite, because most of them were really good!

The winning entry was penned by vekuum:

You lopped off my arms!
Thanks, now I can squeeze through your
Windows at night. Yum!

Vekuum wins the game of Plants vs. Zombies, plus a copy of Ryan Mecum's book Zombie Haiku (shown above).

Here are the runners-up (sorry, no prize):

Gray rain falling down
Neighbors becoming Zombies
in cold October

-- billstewart

Brains are like candy,
sweet grey matter slips through lips,
My arm just fell off.

-- slida

The radio told
me that I would be safe here
Crowded Stadium

-- apocalypticbeef

Though dead, it lives on.
Zombie? Brain-eating corpse? No:
General Motors.

-- andyhavens

Budget for plastic
guns, pasta guts, Wilhelm scream,
is budget enough.

-- bookninja

crunching through his brain
I realized I no longer cared
whether he loved me

-- victriviaqueen

Within the coffin
the cry came from a dead man
reanimated

-- BCJ

Groaning getting loud
Barricades won't hold for long
Nice knowing you all

-- necorium

Thanks to everyone for playing!

An anonymous reader writes to mention that Microsoft has rolled out a preview version of their Bing Search site earlier than expected. Microsoft's hope at putting a dent in Google's ubiquitous search presence, Bing has several new features including Bing Cashback, Bing Video, and Bing xRank. "Bing Video is really great because of the new thumbnail video feature. Try searching for E3 at Bing Video and you'll quickly see how it works. Simply hover over a video and it starts playing instantly. This is fantastic from the consumer's point of view but what about the publisher? It's almost like Microsoft is stepping on their toes by deploying video search in this manner. Would a user still click on to the site if they can watch the whole video from within the search results? Fair use definitely comes into mind here. Perhaps there should be a 30second limitation on the 'thumbnail preview?'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

While not a huge surprise, it's worth noting that the Supreme Court has agreed to take the Bilski case, which has received plenty of attention. If you don't recall, last year, the appeals court tried to further define what was patentable when it came to things like business models and software -- which many had considered to be a wide open field for patenting since 1998 and the State Street ruling. Of course, there's been a lot of controversy (and plenty of confusion) over the Bilski ruling, with some insisting that it really wouldn't impact software and business method patents, and others arguing that it will help kill off many such patents. However, pretty much everyone expected that the Supreme Court (with its recent interest in patent law) would weigh in. So, now we get to go through this battle all over again. Expect a lot of different parties to weigh in on how the Supreme Court should rule. Back when all the amici briefs were filed for the Bilski case, I put up a detailed post about the arguments for and against software patents, and I imagine that what we're about to see will be even more heated. Hopefully, the Supreme Court doesn't make things worse.

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stoolpigeon writes "The cover of SQL in a Nutshell sports a chameleon, the little lizard well known for its ability to blend in just about anywhere. This is a great choice for the Structured Query Language. SQL has been around since the seventies, helping developers interact with the ubiquitous relational database management system. Thirty some years later, SQL grinds away in the background of just about any interactive web site and nameless other technologies. New alternatives are popping up constantly but I'm going to go out on a limb and say that SQL is going to be around for a long time. Anyone interacting with an RDBMS is in all likelihood going to need to use SQL at some point. For those that do, who also want a handy desktop reference available, SQL in a Nutshell has been there for the last 9 years. The SQL language itself has not stood still over those years, and neither have the products that use SQL, and so now the book is available in a third edition." Read on for the rest of JR's review.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

During yesterday's discussion of Twitter's suggested user's list, I got an excellent suggestion from Sarah Delman, CEO of the news-oriented startup, Of Record, Inc.

Here's the story...

We've heard that the SUL is like the list of books that employees of a book store recommend to customers. So this raises the question -- which "books" do the employees of Twitter read -- i.e. who do they follow, and how does that correlate to the list of Twitter users on the SUL?

I loved the idea -- it's my favorite kind of investigative reporting, because it involves programming.

Thanks to the Twitter API, it was actually possible to write a crawler that:

1. Generates a ranked list of who they follow and

2. Highlights the ones who are on the SUL.

I've written and run that crawler and the lengthy table on this page provides the result:

http://scripting.com/sul/twitterCorp.html

You can judge for yourself who influences the people of Twitter, and how that in turn influences the SUL.

There's a wealth of other information in the table, I've already spent a couple of hours pondering it, but it's time to share it with everyone else, and see what you all come up with.

Also thanks to Tom Reynolds for getting me the contents of the SUL late last night in response to a query I posted on Twitter. I didn't know where to find it, and it turns out it's hiding in plain sight on a page on twitter.com.

Also note that people come on and off the SUL. So there are people with high follow counts who are not on the list, who were at one time.

Update: There are four accounts on the SUL that have 0 followers at Twitter: Ali_Nejad, AstrobiologyNAI, LIVESTRONGCEO, PEOPLEPets.

An anonymous employee of a decent sized newspaper forwarded me a letter sent out to employees by John Sturm, the head of the Newspaper Assocation of America called The Reality About Newspapers. It's embedded below:

It lists out a series of 7 "myths" about newspapers, followed by the reality. The first 6 myths are actually good points that we absolutely agree with. Basically, it says the newspaper business really isn't that bad. A lot of people still read the newspaper and most newspapers are quite profitable on an operating basis. Indeed, we've pointed that out in the past. The real problem has mainly been with really poor decisions by some in management to take out huge loans. It's the debt load that's killing so many newspapers -- and it's not helped by the fact that newspaper readership is declining and advertisers have a lot more options than in the past.

However, the 7th myth and reality is just ridiculous:

Myth: If newspapers close, you will still be able to get news from other sources.

Reality: Newspapers make a larger investment in journalism than any other medium. Most of the information you read from "aggregators" and other media originated with newspapers. No amount of effort from local bloggers, non-profit news entities or TV news sources could match the depth and breadth of newspaper-produced content.

The problem is that his "myth" is a reality and his "reality" is a fiction. It is true that today newspapers invest more in journalism, but the rest of his "reality" isn't reality at all. There is simply no reason (nor does he provide one) why other publications can't fill the gap. And, note (carefully) his metric: it's the amount invested in journalism. This is like when movie industry guys say "but how do we keep making $200 million movies." You should never trust anyone who tries to base output on the amount invested. Perhaps the answer is to invest smarter in journalism, rather than investing more.

That said, I should make a separate point that's important: I'm still an optimist and a believer that newspapers will figure this out. A lot of people falsely seem to assume I think all newspapers must or should die. I don't think that at all. I received a few emails from people who were surprised about my comments in a Guardian article about why I think newspapers will figure all this out. But, they won't do it if they continue to think that they have some sort of special quality that makes it impossible for other media to report the news.

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celtic_hackr writes "Well, I never thought I'd be an advocate for placing GPS devices on people. However, since it took less than three days for my local school district to misplace my daughter, I have decided that something needs to be done. By the school district's own admission it is a recurring problem of placing children on the wrong buses. Fortunately, my daughter was located, with no thanks to the local school district. Therefore, I would like input on a way to be able to keep track of my child. I know there are personal tracking devices out there. I have nothing against these systems. But I want more than this. My specification are: 1) a small unobtrusive device I can place on my daughter, 2) an application to pull up on any computer, a map with a dot indicating the real-time position of my child, 3) a handheld device with the equivalent information, 4) [optional] a secure web application/plug-in I can install on my own domain allowing me to track her from anyplace in the world, 5) a means of turning it all off, 6) a Linux based solution of the above. I believe all the pieces for making such a system are out there. Has anyone built anything like this? Is there an open source solution? How would I go about building my own? Has anyone hacked any of these personal trackers before, to serve their own purposes? How does a tinfoil hat wearer engineer such a device to make sure Big-Brother isn't watching too? Can these devices be locked down so only certain devices can pick up the GPS location of an individual locator? What other recommendations do you have?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Christian Ristow's jaw-droppingly amazing Hand of Man was 'on hand' at Maker Faire, crushing barrels with ease! In the above vid, he shares some details about the massive mechanical appendage and its human interface. I didn't get a chance to actually pilot the hand but it looked like the attendees who did had a whole lot of fun. Be sure to check out Christian's site for some other examples of his work.

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I'm loving this sculpture series in the upcoming Venice Bienalle by Jan Fabre called From the feet to the brain . This one is The future merciful heart for men and women and is made from glass, ballpoint pen ink, and human bones. Anybody know how to make something like those glass femurs? Via Who Killed Bambi?

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Jumping on the completely unconfirmed rumor bandwagon it seems that there have been photos leaked for the new iPhone which include things like an auto-focus camera, video capture, and a compass. The photos were originally displayed (and then quickly removed) on a Chinese forum and quickly spread to many other sites including a complete human translation on the MacRumors forum. Looks like Apple security may have to break a few more pocket protectors to keep employees in line.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

So I will admit, in a moment of profound, existential boredom, to picking up and leafing through the SkyMall catalog in the S80 on my flight back from Maker Faire yesterday. I will offer my standard excuse for such behavior: I was looking for clever ideas to liberate by re-make-ifying them. And one of the things that jumped out at me was a litle arched Japanese-style garden footbridge like the one shown below. A simple piece of carpentry, admittedly, but of elegantly minimal beauty. I looked around for plans online, and discovered these, by Rod Bird at Redwood Bridges in Mena, AZ. Rod apparently makes and sells bridges like these for a living, so double love to him for open-sourcing his design.

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LA Weekly reviews the screening of a Daniel Martinico's 15-minute movie, Khaan!, which is a loop of James Kirk winding up to scream the name of his nemesis in The Wrath of Khan. The two-minute clip above, according to reviewer Mark Mauer, "doesn't begin to do justice to the size, sound and hypnotic power of the real thing."

Last week Machine Project in Echo Park showed Martinco's 15-minute meticulously re-spliced creation in a never-ending loop that transforms the moment from one of anguish (or snickering for the the audience) into a meditation, maybe even a mantra.

You'll notice the crowd gets quiet after the first few seconds. It draws you in, forces you to pay attention, even if it's just staring at the back and forth eye tics on Shatner's face for a minute at a time.

"In that moment everyone responds to it," Martinico says. There's laughing at first, but then people get into the rhythm of it and study the various little muscles as they pull and twitch on Kirk's face. "It's a phenomenal range in just a few seconds."

Khaan! The Greatest Syllable Ever Told (Via Joshuah Bearman)

We've seen so many stories about movie theaters that have no problem treating customers like criminals that it's surprising to see one finally get in trouble for it. JJ sent over a story about a movie theater in Quebec that has been fined $10,000 for an unnecessary search of customers. Not surprisingly, the search was to try to catch people bringing video equipment into the theater (wait, I thought the movie industry said Canadian theaters were soft on people videotaping movies?!?), but the court ruled that the search violated one family's privacy when it also turned up a daughter's birth control pills (which her mother wasn't too pleased to discover) along with some snacks they were bringing into the theater. The theater owner acknowledges that they can still search bags, but have to do so with much stricter rules. Or, you know, they could treat paying attendees like they're customers rather than criminals, and perhaps people would feel a lot better about going out to the movies.

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Medgadget reports that the FDA approved Small Bone Innovations' implantable ankle.

This implantable total ankle replacement system is intended for use in patients where there is severe arthritis or other deformities that hinder the range of motion of the joint.

Small Bone Innovations claims that this design of the STAR system is the first of its kind because it relies on movable bearings that glide across the surface of polyethylene. The advantage is that this still affords some joint movement as opposed to traditional fusion surgeries that join the tibia to the talus bone for additional strength but severely limit motion.

FDA approves implantable total ankle replacement

I'm surprised that David missed this story about a gentleman in Nebraska who covered his head with a beer carton to rob a convenience store of cigarettes.

Police spokeswoman Katie Flood said Tuesday morning that the robbery was captured on video. She said the man also dropped the empty 12-pack box as he fled, and it will be checked for fingerprints.

Man wore beer carton on head to rob store

I've been traveling in Guatemala for the past few weeks, and following (and blogging) the ongoing political crisis here. BB editors are contributing periodic essays to GOOD Magazine, and the so-called "Twitter Revolution" taking place in Guatemala is the subject of my latest contribution, from the road:

Despite widespread fears the protests would turn violent, and even with government-organized pro-Colom demonstrations just blocks away (the administration is said to have spent millions of quetzales in public funds to organize the events, pay poor participants, and bus them in by the thousands from the country’s interior), street activity has been peaceful so far.

But backlash to online activity has been intense, notably from the sector of Guatemala’s government that controls the country’s financial system. One Twitter user was arrested, jailed, and faces up to 10 years in prison for having posted a single 96-character tweet about the bank at the center of the corruption scandal. Guatemala’s Supervisor of Banks, Édgar Barquín, has proposed sweeping controls on internet use, including a requirement that anyone who wants to log on in an internet café must first register their national ID card (cedula) at the front desk.

In keeping with the hall-of-mirrors, telenovela-like surreality that marks Guatemalan politics, Colom’s chief political rival—former Army general Otto Perez Molina—recently denounced a purported plot to assassinate him . Colom’s party dismissed those claims as having been fabricated “for show.” On Twitter, some countered that the lack of institutional ability to investigate any crime is the root of the current crisis, so all claims of threats should be treated with equal respect and due process.

“All we are saying is give the rule of law a chance,” one “tuitero” direct-messaged me.

“Who are we supposed to trust when all of the institutions of the state are compromised?,” tweeted another.

That overwhelming lack of faith in any state institutions is what many outside of Guatemala see as most concerning.

A recent article in The Economist suggests Guatemala is now well on its way to becoming a “failed state.” Some op-ed writers in Guatemalan papers responded defensively. But the longer Rosenberg’s symbolically important case goes unsolved, the longer corruption is perceived as unchecked, the longer the already horrific violent crime stats in Guatemala continue to climb, and the greater the risk of total collapse.

GOOD: The “Twitter Revolution” - Social media meets social unrest in Guatemala

(Image by Guatemalan photographer and blogger Surizar)

* Dance Dance Immolation: Flames! Games! Dames! Experience the funky flaming glory that is DANCE DANCE IMMOLATION, a pyro-parody of the popular arcade game in which one jumps around on touch-sensitive pads underfoot in rhythm with music. (Download MP4 / Watch on YouTube)

* "Big Yank" Vintage Jeans TV Ad (late '70s or early '80s, we think?) that screams "WEDGIE," or something worse. Courtesy Oddball Film + Video, who do screenings from their extensive weirdo film/TV/ad video archives every week in San Francisco, and also offer a stock footage service. (Download MP4 / Watch on YouTube)

* Boiler Bar: "Punk, Hot Rod, Geek, Blue Collar, and Maker Culture mixed together with the Petroleum Golden Age of the last century." (Download MP4 / Watch on YouTube)

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

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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."

Techdirt has an amusing story about the expanding adoption of the RIAA-style business model of collecting settlement money from threats of litigation based on copyright infringement claims. This story comes with an amusing twist with the two cited companies, Davenport Lyons and ACS, being clearly related and ACS publishing an article with clearly plagiarized selections. Anything to make a buck I guess. "TorrentFreak noticed that an article apparently published by ACS Law was actually plagiarized from a variety of different sources, basically cut and pasted together with no credit or citations given at all. Remarkably, in some cases, articles with the exact opposite view of ACS Law were copied with paragraphs that just had an added sentence to the end which completely contradicted what the original article said."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Created by Drew McLellan and Rachel Andrew, "Perch is a really little content management system for when you (or your clients) need to edit content without the hassle of setting up a big CMS." It looks like a fantastic solution, and be sure to visit a short page like this one, and refresh. Watch the trees and birdy grow and slide into place. That's craftsmanship. #

Spanner Spencer writes "Talk to iPhone games developers, and the feature they're most excited about in the new iPhone 3.0 software is the ability to do in-game micro-transactions. And while you might wonder if this is just an excuse to get iPhone gamers to dip into their wallets even more often, it's actually a hugely positive thing for several reasons. Downloadable content, virtual items, subscription billing and fast-track social advancement are some of them, so Pocket Gamer looks into a bit more depth about what you can expect on the micro-payments side once iPhone 3.0 debuts."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Spanner Spencer writes "Talk to iPhone games developers, and the feature they're most excited about in the new iPhone 3.0 software is the ability to do in-game micro-transactions. And while you might wonder if this is just an excuse to get iPhone gamers to dip into their wallets even more often, it's actually a hugely positive thing for several reasons. Downloadable content, virtual items, subscription billing and fast-track social advancement are some of them, so Pocket Gamer looks into a bit more depth about what you can expect on the micro-payments side once iPhone 3.0 debuts."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

There are plenty of instances of misleading and otherwise bad stats being used by anti-piracy groups, like the recent BSA numbers from Canada that were basically made up. Now, a group from the UK is saying that piracy costs that country's economy tens of billions of pounds. It makes the same mistake as plenty of other studies before it: counting every instance of piracy, or perhaps even just the availability of copyrighted material on file-sharing networks, as a lost sale. It's fallacious to assume that every single person that downloads a piece of content, or simply has access to it for free, would pay for it if the free version wasn't available. Furthermore, any study like this that says an entire economy is being harmed by X amount of money because of piracy is pretty much bogus. This money that's supposedly being lost because of piracy isn't being lost by the economy, as undoubtedly it's being spent elsewhere. It's not being flushed down the toilet or turned into ether, it's just not ending up in content companies' bank accounts.

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

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Tamron has announced that the availability of Sony and Pentax versions its 10-24mm wide-angle zoom APS-C cameras. The lens, which received a Recommended rating when tested in its Nikon mount guise, will be available in Japan from June 12th, the company says, with sales then expanding to other markets.

hemantm writes "A routine security update for a Microsoft Windows component installed on tens of millions of computers has quietly installed an extra add-on for an untold number of users surfing the Web with Mozilla's Firefox Web browser."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Last night's podcast is up this morning, bright and early!

A theme from last week continues this week: Bug catching as a key practice in a re-booted system of news. Jay unfolds an example from this week: the AP's coverage of the Twitter TV show.

The TechGuardian's asks How much is it worth to be one of Twitter's suggested users?

Dave discusses BitTorrent and why he put RTN 1-10 on it.

CheckBox News, Dave's mock-up of a re-booted user interface for television news where you can uncheck the streams you don't want and check the ones you do, and program your TV set that way.

For sources of inspiration (it's his turn) Dave returned to three: James Burke's public television series Connections, about the history of science and technology (inventions are usually the result of synthesis of things lying created by earlier inventors); the Cluetrain Manifesto (ten years old and great); and VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet program for personal computers-- the demo for which was almost a spiritual experience. With a response from Jay about the common thread: distributing power outward from the insiders to the users.

Two views of the announcement this week that the New York Times had hired a social media editor, Jennifer Preston.

Dave argues that the great news organizations should be the operators and originators of systems like Twitter. It's not too late, but soon it will be, he warns.

We close with a short reading from Barbara Ehrenreich's commencement speech to the UC Berkeley School of Journalism. "A recession won't stop us. A dying industry won't stop us. Even poverty won't stop us because we are all on a mission here."

What role does morality and choice play in our videogames? Recently on Offworld, Simon Parkin takes a deep look into Sucker Punch's just-launched PlayStation 3 debut inFamous, where the "villainous choice in any moral decision the strategically superior one", and talks to Far Cry 2 designer Clint Hocking about a future of games where creators can "model a system wherein the player is able to be or not be racist or violent and see the repercussions of those decisions." We watched Japan based designer Mark Cooke's recent Tokyo Pecha Kucha presentation in which he attempted to create 10 games in 10 hours and mostly got there (and will be expanding one idea into an official game), and discovered both a wonderful repository of hi-res artwork from Fumito Ueda's PS2 masterpiece Shadow of the Colossus, and the possibility of an Ico/LittleBigPlanet crossover (above). We also saw the first video teaser for Harmonix/TT Games' fantastically unlikely Lego Rock Band game, saw a homebrew version of Mega Man enter a new dimension, and new open-source software to turn your NES into an art gallery, and spotted Etsy designer's SaltyandSweet's home-made Team Fortress 2 mobile. And our 'one shot's for the day: Tom Gauld's terrifying end of level boss, circa 1865, and the posthumous regret of not bringing your Game Boy to the grave.

rsmiller510 writes "For those of you who think Google Wave is all that and a bag of chips, I put on the brakes and give you a few questions to ponder."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

(I'm traveling and blogging from Guatemala right now, so expect a number of posts from me specific to this region. - XJ).

During a recent (and all-too-brief) visit to Antigua, Guatemala, I stopped by an exhibit at the Centro de Cooperación Española, which included some recent works by the Guatemalan artist Alejandro Marré. My favorite in his "series of interventions on Guatemalan traditional paintings" above, more images on his blog.

The visual joke here is that one encounters folksy little oil paintings that look just like this for sale as tourist mementos on the cobblestone streets of Antigua -- minus the Teletubbies, Star Wars characters, and other hacks the artist has added.

The site where the show took place is stunning, and was built about 500 years ago. It began as a Jesuit college, then went through various incarnations after various natural disasters destroyed it a few times over.

Here are a few crude snapshots I took of external details -- the site served as the town's central marketplace for about 200 years.

This sign points you to what things you could once find for sale in which sections of the building: vegetables, salted meats, clay cooking pots, whatever the average Guatemalan home in the late 1800s might require. I can't quite make out what all of them say, or mean, but as I read the list I found myself imagining what kind of activity -- and foods, and other products -- I might have encountered if I were standing in this spot 200 years ago.

We recently discussed UK law firm, Davenport Lyons, which had been criticized widely for running a controversial campaign supposedly to stamp out copyright infringement, but seemed a lot more like extortion to many. Basically it would contract with software companies to enforce their copyright... and would then send out a ton of demand letters (based on questionable evidence) requiring cash payments to avoid being sued. Not surprisingly, many people just paid up rather than risk getting sued -- even if they were innocent. Of course, all the controversy and negative publicity seemed to get back to the company. High profile clients like Atari dropped them. Last month, some noticed a nearly identical campaign, but this time coming from a different company called ACS Law. The only problem? A little investigating suggested that the two firms were clearly related -- with ACS using documents created by Davenport Lyons.

Things continue to get more ridiculous, as TorrentFreak noticed that an article apparently published by ACS Law was actually plagiarized from a variety of different sources, basically cut and pasted together with no credit or citations given at all. Remarkably, in some cases, articles with the exact opposite view of ACS Law were copied with paragraphs that just had an added sentence to the end which completely contradicted what the original article said.

It really is quite amusing how often those who insist they're big supporters of intellectual property and not "stealing" the works of others always seem to get caught red-handed in plagiarism and copying others' work. In the meantime, how often do we see supporters of more reasonable copyright (or no copyright) get caught doing this? Hmm?

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snydeq writes "InfoWorld reports on the fight over open source 'leeches' — companies that use open source technology but don't give back to the open source community. While some view such organizations as a tragedy of the commons, others view the notion of 'freeloaders' as a relic of open source's Wild West era, when coding was a higher calling and free software a religion. To be sure, increased adoption by mainstream enterprises has played a hand in changing the terms of this debate. Yet, as the biggest consumer of open source software, enterprise IT still gives almost nothing back to the community, critics contend, calling into question the long-term effect corporate culture will have on the evolution of open source — and the long-term effect open source will have on rewiring companies toward collaboration."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I thoroughly enjoyed Kieran Levis's Winners and Losers: Creators and Casualties of the Age of the Internet, a collection of case-studies of businesses that have thrived or tanked as a result of their relationship to technology. From record companies to IBM, from Sony to Webvan, from Google to Nokia, Levis examines the clunkers and the strokes of genius (or luck) that made headlines for each firm as it coped with the 'net's disruptivity.

After each case-study, Levis tries to extract the principles embodied by the decisions that led to the companies' fate. These principles contradict themselves: be big fast (Amazon); don't get too big too fast (Webvan); do the right thing and figure out the business later (Google); change fast (the record companies); content is king (BSkyB); content is a boat-anchor (Sony); and so on.

The takeaway for me was that different circumstances demand different strategic responses (duh), and by getting all this meaty context about what worked and for whom, I felt better equipped to make decisions about my own strategies in the future.

Winners and Losers: Creators and Casualties of the Age of the Internet (UK)

Winners and Losers: Creators and Casualties of the Age of the Internet (US)

Brendan sez, "I saw the 'Unwigged and Unplugged' show starring Spinal Tap members Michael McKean, Harry Shearer, and Christopher Guest on Saturday in Chicago. Aside from all the expected stuff they played from Spinal Tap, A Mighty Wind, and other movies, they also sang 'Saucy Jack,' which you will remember David and Derek discuss at the end of the film _This is Spinal Tap_ [ed: It's the title track from their unproduced rock-opera about Jack the Ripper]. Then, they announced that you could download the track for free from the Spinal Tap website. I thought other Boingers out there would enjoy it."

You're a naughty one Saucy Jack! You're a dirty one Saucy Jack!

Saucy Jack' (Thanks, Brendan!)

Tom Steinberg from MySociety sez, "We've just launched Mapumental, which is an a realtime version of our lovely transport journey time maps which BB has covered before. As well as being realtime generated, they include house price and 'scenicness' data, generated by the web game ScenicOrNot. Beta's private at the moment but we're handing out invites in exchange for declarations of love."

I got to play with this last week and my jaw dropped -- what an amazing way to visualize your home and the regions around it!

Say hello to Mapumental (Thanks, Tom!)

theodp writes "Speaking at the Google I/O Developer Conference, Sergey Brin described Google's efforts to defeat "Page's Law," the tendency of software to get twice as slow every 18 months. 'Fortunately, the hardware folks offset that,' Brin joked. 'We would like to break Page's Law and have our software become increasingly fast on the same hardware.' Page, of course, refers to Google co-founder Larry Page, last seen delivering a nice from-the-heart commencement address at Michigan that's worth a watch (or read)."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A coalition of young doctors and medical researchers have written an open letter to the World Health Organization asking it to publicly condemn the use of pseudoscientific homeopathic remedies for the treatment of serious diseases, especially in the developing world:

The letter:

# Explains that medics working with the most rural and impoverished people of the world already struggle to deliver the medical help that is needed. The promotion of homeopathy for serious diseases puts lives at risk.

# Lists some of the examples of recent and planned developments of homeopathic clinics offering treatment for these five conditions.

# Asks the WHO to make clear that homeopathy cannot prevent or treat these five conditions.

Leading experts in malaria, HIV and other serious diseases affecting the developing world are supporting the young medics' and researchers' call for the WHO to take action.

Homeopathy urgently condemned for serious diseases

We mentioned on Thursday that Wikipedia has banned edits originating from certain IP addresses belonging to the Church of Scientology; reader newtley writes now that Scientology leader (CEO and Chairman of the Board of the linked, but legally separate, Religious Technology Center) David Miscavige calls the ban "a 'despicable hate crime,' and asks, 'What's next, will Scientologists have to wear yellow, six-pointed stars on our clothing?' During World War II, Hitler forced Jewish men, women and children to wear a a yellow cloth star bearing the word Jude to brand them in the streets of Europe, and in the Nazi death camps."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

People are cutting back on lots of spending these days, but one area that was supposedly relatively safe was in-home entertainment expenditures. Things like cable and satellite TV and Netflix were thought to even thrive during economic downturns as people looked to limit going out, choosing instead to stay in and be entertained. While that seems to be working out for Netflix, cable companies are starting to feel the pinch as people drop their subscriptions and get their TV fix online. While it's a relatively small number of people that are making the move, it's the sort of thing that cable companies have been concerned about for a while. The WSJ story talks about some moves by the likes of Comcast and Time Warner to grab more online viewers, but if the cable companies continue to try and treat their online efforts in the same way as their traditional offerings, it's hard to see much success. It doesn't seem like a coincidence that this is happening as cable companies are looking to introduce caps on their broadband services. They say it's because some consumers are creating too much traffic, in part because of their online video viewing, and it's straining their networks. But perhaps it's just a way to try and capture lost TV revenue from cord-cutters? Of course, trying to get users who are going broadband-only for their TV to take on metered broadband seems like a good way to drive them to competitors with uncapped plans.

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

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Another Maker Faire, another inspired set of photos from Scott Beale. Thanks, as always, Scott. You're the man!

Photos: Maker Faire 2009

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Slatterz writes "LGA 1366 is Intel's first new desktop socket in four years. It uses the same ZIF design as the familiar LGA 775 architecture, but it incorporates many more contacts. These big architectural changes are backed up by some less visible advances. Until now, Intel's quad-core processors have been constructed from two dual-core dies, but now Core i7 brings together four cores on a single die. It's also Intel's first processor design to use an L3 cache, shared between all four cores."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

So, say you're a general news magazine that's struggling to remain even remotely relevant in an internet era... what do you do? Apparently if you're Time, you think about charging. This isn't all that surprising, really, given that Time Magazine published that poorly thought out article arguing for micropayments for online publications. It just makes you wonder who these people are making these decisions and if they ever bothered to look at all of the attempts in the past to charge for such content online.

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Jimmy sez, "Someone leaked the minutes for a meeting of food-packaging executives and chemical industry lobbyists seeking to find ways to keep consumers buying goods laced with bisphenol-A. Attending companies included Coca-Cola, Del Monte, Alcoa and the Grocery Manufacturers Association (GMA)."

Attendees suggested using fear tactics (e.g. "Do you want to have access to baby food anymore?") as well as giving control back to consumers (e.g. you have a choice between the more expensive product that is frozen or fresh or foods packaged in cans) as ways to dissuade people from choosing BPA-free packaging. Attendees noted, in the past, the different associations have had a reactive strategy with the media, with very limited proactive outreach in reaching out to journalists. The committee agrees they need to promote new, relevant content to get the BPA perspective into the media mix. The committee believes industry studies are tainted from the public perspective.

The committee doubts social media outlets, such as Facebook or Twitter, will work for positive BPA outreach. The committee wants to focus on quality instead of quantity in disseminating messages (e.g. a young kid or pregnant mother providing a positive quote about BPA, a testimonial from an outside expert, providing positive video, advice from third party experts, and relevant messaging on the GMA website). Members noted traditional media outreach has become too expensive (they have already spent hundreds of thousands of dollars) and the media is starting to ignore their side. The committee doubts obtaining a scientific spokesperson is attainable. Their "holy grail" spokesperson would be a "pregnant young mother who would be willing to speak around the country about the benefits of BPA."

I don't know if these are real or not, though I am inclined to trust ScienceBlogs as a source overall, there's precious little provenance here (on the other hand, the industry association has confirmed that a document like this leaked).

BPA gets attention from industry spinmeisters (leaked minutes)

PS Publishing recently released Secret Histories, a massive, ambitious, 600-page annotated bibliography of the work of Tim Powers: science fiction writer, Philip K Dick protege, and all-round swell fella. They've put a PDF excerpt on the web for free:

We're so proud of Secret Histories that we want everyone to know what it's like. So we've made up a 24-page high resolution sampler PDF file that you can download for free.

It includes a chunk of the bibliography section that lists every edition of Powers' seminal The Anubis Gates, as well as China Mieville's tribute to the novel, examples of Dick Berger's exclusive artwork, excerpts and notes and doodles by Powers himself, and much more - and it still represents just a fraction of what the book itself contains.

FREE sample excerpt from Secret Histories

10.2MB PDF excerpt

(Thanks, Paul!)

blakeharris snips from a site called The X-Journals: "Nick Pope used to work for the British Ministry of Defense and for 3 years headed up their UFO project. His remit was to investigate UFO sightings reported to the British government, looking for evidence of any potential threat, or anything judged to be of any 'defence significance.'" Some very interesting anecdotes in here, as well as some background on how certain files about these sightings came to be preserved in the first place.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Wired's Charles Graeber has an astounding piece up about master lockpicker Marc Weber Tobias, who challenged Medeco's claim that its locks are "bump-proof" (that is, that they can't be simply broken by filing down a key, inserting it, and tapping it, sending a shock down the metal that makes the pins jump). Medeco launched an aggressive campaign to market its products to people who were worried about bump keys, but Tobias shows that their locks aren't substantially harder to bump than cheaper models from competitors. Medeco sent Wired a note that said Tobias's claims weren't true and implied that Wired might be sued for publishing them, so Wired set up a test, and then Medeco raised a flurry of vague, lame objections to the test. But the test speaks for itself -- the Medecos fly open at Tobias's caress.

More interesting is Graeber's look at the motives, personality and technology of lockpickers -- a fine trick of the tech journalist, blending culture and gadgets into a seamless whole.

The problem, if you're a safe company or a lock maker, is that Tobias makes it all public through hacker confabs, posts on his Security.org site, and tech blogs like Engadget. He views this glasnost as a public service. Others see a hacker how-to that makes The Anarchist Cookbook read like Betty Crocker. And where Tobias sees a splendid expression of First Amendment rights, locksmiths and security companies see a criminal finishing school. Tobias isn't just exposing problems, they say. He is the problem.

But forget bike locks and hotel room safes: These days, Tobias is attacking the lock famous for protecting places like military installations and the homes of American presidents and British royals.

Between stabs at his salad, Tobias hands me his latest idea of fun: nearly 300 pages of self-published hacker-porn detailing his attack on the allegedly uncrackable Medeco high-security lock. "Trust me, this will cause a goddamned riot!" he says, dabbing at tears of joy with a paper napkin. "Oh yeah, this is way, way bigger than the liquid explosives thing!" And he's right, it is bigger--and with way, way bigger consequences.

The Ultimate Lock Picker Hacks Pentagon, Beats Corporate Security for Fun and Profit

I'm thoroughly enjoying the Morbid Anatomy blog, which features anatomical curiosities and news, with a Victorian bent. For example:

I just stumbled upon a review--in English!--of the magnificent catalog Figures du Corps: Une Leçon d'Anatomie à l'École des Beaux-Arts, from an exhibition of the same name previously covered on this blog. The review parses the catalog nicely...

Morbid Anatomy (via Science Friday)

Monochrom's Maker Faire tee says it best: "Slacking is killing the DIY industry."

New monochrom shirt: "Slacking is killing the DIY industry"

On today's XKCD, Stephenie "teen superstar author" Meyer takes on 4chan, home of Anoymous and the Internet's most prolific trolls. And wins.

Troll Slayer

Core77's Carla Diana looks at the design solutions that industrial designers have come up with to impart fetishistic desirability on the hard drives that are replacing thousands and thousands of books, CDs, videos, games, etc. My world is definitely divided into stuff that I can compress onto a hard-drive and then stick in a box and forget, and stuff that gets displayed or worn, and virtually nothing else (though I just discovered the hard way that moving a half-terabyte of data from your old encrypted laptop hard drive to your new one is a veeerrrryyy sloooooow).

If so much of our personal history is getting compressed into data, and digital imaging, cloud computing, and streaming media have become an integral part of daily experience, being sensitive to the physical presence of these devices is an important responsibility. Creating distinctive, engaging objects that help people manage and understand the nature of data--an imperceptible property that is at once fragmented, modular and flowing--is a new and challenging opportunity. Data-management devices such as routers, hard drives and modems--previously relegated to back corners and spaces under desks--are now front and center, featuring prominently in people's living rooms, desktops and front pockets. Once the exclusive domain of the cable guy and corporate IT manager, they are now mainstream products that moms and dads will buy to place front and center in a living room, veritable shrines to the data that is contained within or flowing through them. Once designed to look benign, apologetic and clumsily invisible, they are now becoming sculptural pieces that warrant a strong presence in the domestic landscape. Though it may often seem like the industrial designer's job is to create a "black box" around circuit boards, the ability to take the complex nature of data and translate it into meaningful form is more important than ever before. More than mere shells for electronic components, they play a totemic role in the home and act as the threshold for rich, emotionally-laden content and timely personal communication.

Atoms For Bits: Designing physical embodiments for virtual content - Core77 (via Beyond the Beyond