There's talk that this illustration of Sonia Sotomayor depicted as an Asian on the cover of The National Review is racist, which I kind of think it is. But I also have to admit the craftsmanship of the illustration is top-notch. It reminds me of Artzybasheff or Covarrubias (see here and here).

It's no secret that we think newspaper paywalls are an incredibly bad strategic move for most newspapers for a variety of reasons -- but now perhaps we can add one more to the list. Romenesko quotes Nick Denton pointing out that many star journalists hate the idea of their content appearing behind a paywall, because it takes away much of their audience -- and they want that audience. It's an interesting point -- though, we've certainly seen plenty of journalists clamoring for a paywall, assuming (incorrectly) that it would somehow help the newspapers make more money. Perhaps the point is that the good journalists know a paywall is a bad idea -- meaning that putting one up is likely to drive those journalists to other newspapers, giving people even less of a reason to pay for the locked up content online.

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snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Martin Heller takes VS2010 Beta 1 for a test drive and finds the upgrade promising, particularly with regard to improved thread debugging and a revamped UI. But the biggest enhancements have to do with parallel programming, Heller writes. 'I'm not sure that I've completely grasped the power of the new .Net Framework and native C++ support for task and data parallelism in VS2010, but what I've seen so far is impressive.' Heller points to intriguing parallel programming samples posted to CodePlex and offers numerous screenshots of VS2010 Beta 1 functionality. He also notes that the beta still lacks support for ASP.Net MVC, smart devices, and the .Net Micro Framework."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Researchers conducted a test to find out if individuals can make better estimates of historical dates if they make two guesses and average them. It turns out they can!

Herzog and Hertwig used the insights of the “wisdom of crowd” perspective to make one head nearly as good as two. After participants made their first guesses at the dates of historical events, they then made a second estimate using one of two methods. In one condition, participants simply gave a second estimate. This condition did little to increase either knowledge or diversity.

In the second condition, participants were given detailed directions for making their follow-up guess: “First, assume that your first estimate is off the mark. Second, think about a few reasons why that could be. Which assumptions and considerations could have been wrong? Third, what do these new considerations imply?... Fourth, based on this new perspective, make a second, alternative estimate.” When the participants used the more involved method, the average was significantly more accurate than the first estimate. The “crowd within” achieved about half the accuracy gains that would have been achieved by averaging with a second person.

How to tap the wisdom of the crowd in your head

Bryant writes "Scientists with the Carnegie Institution for Science have discovered what could bring yet another massive advance in memory and storage. The discovery, a magnetoresistence literally 'up to 1000 times more powerful' than the Great Magnetoresistence Effect discovered roughly 20 years ago, which led to one of the major breakthroughs in memory, seems to be a result of high-pressure interactions between Manganites. Manganites aren't new to this game; MRAM uses Manganite layers to achieve the Magnetic Tunnel Effect needed to keep the state of memory stable. Applying significant amounts of pressure to known tech-useful materials isn't a new trick; you might recall the recent breakthrough with Europium superconductivity thanks to similar high-pressure antics."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Despite claiming to represent the interests of songwriters and composers, ASCAP has consistently provided bad advice on how they should respond to digital technology and the internet. For ASCAP and many other collection societies, anything that doesn't involve royalties seems automatically bad (despite all the success from artists who've been freeing up their content), and other questionable practices raise serious doubts over how royalty money is handled once collected. Now, ASCAP wants to increase the toll on video games and is encouraging video game music composers to reserve performance rights (via Michael Scott). Typically, game developers purchase rights (including performance rights) from music composers, but ASCAP's Director of Legal Affairs, Christine Pepe, argues that the practice no longer makes sense. She suggests adopting the model that was developed for film and television, where composers and songwriters often negotiate contractual provisions for performance royalties.

Not surprisingly, there are some major problems with the article.

First of all, Pepe cites Rock Band, Guitar Hero, Dance Dance Revolution and Stubbs the Zombie to highlight the prominence of music in video games nowadays. These are all cases of popular songs being used in games, rather than music being written for games... yet she's presumably addressing people who write music for video games. Early versions of Guitar Hero used covers to make licensing easier, so composers weren't even part of the negotiation. This licensing is about synchronization or mechanical rights -- not performance rights. Labels have complained that these games aren't paying enough for the music, but it's the games that increase the value (and sales) of the music, not the other way around. These games could simply choose other good music and still be popular. ASCAP clearly doesn't understand that, while music can add value to games, games add value to music. Pepe says that older video game music is "probably difficult to imagine... in a context other than the games themselves." She isn't trying very hard to use her imagination, as there are plenty of examples of older video game music having a life outside of the games. Would anyone care about the Mario theme if it weren't part of the game? The lesson from old video game music isn't that performance royalties used to be negligible. It's that success for a video game music composer isn't just about writing good music, but about having that music associated with successful games.

Second, Pepe's argument that there's a public performance of music in video games seems like a real stretch:

Now, because video games are being delivered by entities other than developers and on transmission-based platforms such as the Internet, there is no reason that composers of music for video games should sign away their rights. Take for instance, X-Box — it is now fully integrated with the Internet and allows users to stream games (instead of just purchase the physical product in the store). Internet-based services that now offer streaming of video games are causing the music contained in such games to be publicly performed. The providers of these video game services typically have or should have a license from ASCAP (and possibly other public performance right organizations). [emphasis mine]

What does "streaming" a video game even mean? A video game is interactive; it's not a one-way broadcast, but communication over a network. Is Pepe suggesting that there's a public performance simply because software communicates over the internet? Email happens on the internet. Is that a public performance? There's such a thing as private communication over a network. Games like Gears of War, for example, allow you to play in co-op mode with another player in the same room or online. I find it hard to believe that the location of player two would determine whether or not the music is being publicly performed. What about a multiplayer game on a local area network? Why would that be any different, in terms of a public performance of music, from a multi-player game with everyone in the same room? Simply playing a game over a network doesn't make it a performance, nor does that make it public.

But maybe Pepe isn't referring to having players in remote locations, but having games in remote locations. She uses the Xbox as an example, which seems odd because, as I understand it, the Xbox Live Arcade lets you download games, but that's quite different from streaming. It's the video game equivalent of the iTunes Music Store, not an internet radio station. Digital distribution doesn't mean public performance -- the game is still played locally, just off a hard drive instead of a plastic disk.

Okay, so maybe Pepe was trying to talk about a platform that actually hosts and runs games on a remote computer. Still, it's pretty hard to believe that just because software is run remotely it's a public performance of the music, when the act of hearing the music would be indistinguishable if the software were run locally. Is it a "public" if I check my email using the Gmail web interface instead of Thunderbird? I have a music server running at home which lets me login and listen to my library from anywhere -- is using that a public performance? Do I need a license to listen to my own library because it's on a different hard drive? How does playing music in a video game become a public performance simply because of the hard drive the game resides on or the CPU that runs the process?

Furthermore, let's pretend there's actually public performance taking place. Is it even in a composer's best interest to demand these royalties? (This is not about a composers "right to get paid;" composers are getting paid -- upfront.) Making it harder for people to hear your music is rarely a good idea. Like with theme music for WKRP in Cincinnati or House in the UK, game developers may just seek other music if the licensing requirements are too burdensome. Focusing on getting every penny for every use of the music ignores the value of being included in a game, film or television show. The lesson from video game music of the past and present is that having your music included in a great game is extremely valuable. Not only are you getting paid to be promoted, but the game developers are even doing the hard work of getting fans to connect with the music! Rather than demanding compensation for every use, composers and songwriters should look at other ways to take advantage of the opportunity to make more money from the increased fan base. If ASCAP were really representing their interests, it would be helping them do this instead of pretending that the internet and video games are like television and insisting on performance royalties which will only get in the way of new business models. Of course, don't expect ASCAP to promote anything that isn't about increasing royalties. If your only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail...

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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Amanda Callahan writes to tell us that Apple's upcoming WWDC could be quite a test for the Cupertino powerhouse. They will most likely be missing Steve Jobs for star-power and have extremely high expectations to meet in order to maintain their edge. Thankfully it looks like Jobs will be rejoining Apple later this month with a good prognosis after facing severe health issues. "The competition is now catching up. Palm, Google, Microsoft, Nokia and Research in Motion, maker of the BlackBerry, are all at varying stages of developing and introducing their own iPhone-like devices and software, along with easily accessible stores for the small programs known as applications, or apps, that run on those devices. In some cases, those companies are releasing a greater variety of phones, on more wireless carriers around the world, than Apple. To maintain its advantage, Apple must preserve the impression that it is far ahead of rivals when it comes to the capabilities and the 'cool' factor of its devices."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Remember Star Simpson? We do (previous BB post here), and we think she's pretty great. Star emailed today and said,

I've been working at MonkeyLectric (the POV bike wheel makers, boingboing covered their very first stuff), and just finished this video of the latest wheel display at MonkeyLectric.

Specs: A 4-spoke 256 RGB LED system with stabilized images and video from 8 to 25 mph (12 to 40 km/h). Zigbee wireless control. More on the system at MonkeyLectric.com.

Our Lisa Katayama of BB Gadgets, who also maintains the Tokyomango blog about Japanese culture, says,

A guy who served 17+ years for child murder in Japan was proved innocent and freed yesterday. He claims he was threatened and beaten into making a confession, and his dad died from shock after his conviction. Sad.

Man intimidated into admitting murder is set free after 17 years in prison (Tokyomango)

With the upcoming biennial summit of authors and composers in Washington D.C., The Register has an interview with Eric Baptiste head of the International Confederation of Authors and Composers Societies (CISAC) that touches on some of the hot issues. "There's no one-stop shopping anymore. We were working to put that in place in the Santiago Agreement [2000] which got struck down by the European Commission [in 2004]. It would put together all the world's repertory and enable one society to grant a worldwide license. That was a very bold move. - It's a pity it was not appreciated at the time by the European Commission."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I was stunned to see the MonkeyLectric folks' new persistence of vision (POV) bike-wheel video display at Maker Faire, and to see how far they've... er... driven this tech since the last time I saw it. The video does a good job of showing off all that it can now do. Dan Goldwater adds:

I didn't say it in the video, but this is cutting-edge tech! The notorious 'pimpstar' car wheels only do static images, not video. They also appear to have much worse color depth - their video shows only 8 colors while we have 4096 - this was a significant technical hurdle in POV and i have not seen any other POV system anywhere with more than 8 colors (or with full video).

MonkeyLectric.com

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Last year, Swiss officials told Logistep -- one of a few companies that tries to scan file sharing networks for IPs used by suspected copyright infringers -- that its efforts were an illegal violation of privacy rights. However, a new court ruling has overturned that original ruling, and has said that Logistep is perfectly legal. The court appears to have said that preventing piracy somehow trumps privacy rights -- which seems kind of odd. I'm actually not a huge fan of claims (or lawsuits) that such services violate privacy. I'm not entirely clear how your basic IP address is "private." It's "public" by default, in that your computer uses it publicly to identify itself, so I'm not clear how that's automatically seen as "private" info. However, it seems odd to claim that simply tracking unauthorized usage trumps privacy rights. If that's the case, you have no privacy rights at all, because officials could just claim that they're violating your privacy to prevent any crime you might be committing. So, while I think it's a bit silly to declare IP addresses private, if they are considered private then I have a hard time seeing why Logistep should be allowed to do what it does.

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FTP will be around for a long time, just as HTML and SMTP will.

I still deploy apps today that use FTP to transmit files. For example, I have a flow of AFP wire photos that streams through an app running in the OPML Editor. They send the photos via FTP. A huge number of bits are transmitted this way, every day. Billions of them, just to my server.

In turn, I transmit those bits to a server on wordpress.com, using XML-RPC. Another protocol, which, like FTP, will be around for many years to come.

I call a server somewhere in the world (probably in US) running software written by a man from Turkey, that turns these pictures into thumbnails. To do that transaction we use HTTP.

I have a River of News aggregator running on a server in my house. It reads feeds in a variety of formats and presents the results in HTML over HTTP.

I have an app running on my living room computer that reads the feeds of some of my friends, and when it detects a new item in one of them it posts a message to a Twitter feed. It uses RSS on the input side, and calls the Twitter API using HTTP and XML (a format of their own invention which is sure to become a standard because of the popularity of Twitter). I read these results on twitter.com, and over 1000 people follow this feed, accessing it from a wide variety of Twitter clients, spread over the world.

I could go on and on. I've been programming similar apps for many years, they are deployed on lots of machines, and they use all manner of formats and protocols. None of them are going to "die." You can no more get rid of them than you can all the microbes that inhabit the human body. If you tried, you would die long before they did.

I once told a live oak tree on my property in Woodside, a very beautiful stately tree that had been there for decades, that I owned it. The tree laughed. "I've been here for decades, and I will be here decades after you're gone." That was 15 years ago. The tree was right. I left Woodside in 2003.

I moved to the Internet in 1994 from heavily controlled platforms, because it was and is the platform without a platform vendor. Every once in a while a company comes along that looks like, to some, that it will suck up all the energy of the Internet behind their domain. Don't bet on it. More likely, they will advance the art in some useful way, and then distribute their users the way a flower disburses seed.

If you're looking for something that will die, look at the companies, not the formats and protocols. They're like cockroaches and microbes, and the trees -- they'll be around long after the companies are gone. They get the last laugh.

Maingear has just unveiled what they are calling the "planet's greenest gaming PC." Built using a small form factor and coming with Intel's new Ion graphics as default option, this little powerhouse is built with a definite eye towards energy consumption. "Said configuration is available with Intel Core 2 Duo CPUs and an 80+ certified 300-watt power supply; those who care more about frame rates than Ma Earth can opt for a GeForce 9800 GT ECO, which -- despite being a discrete, power-hungry GPU — still swallows some 40 percent less power than a standard 9800 GT. You'll also find WiFi support, room for an optional Blu-ray drive and TV tuner, upwards of 8GB of RAM and room for a single 2.5-inch HDD or SSD. The whole box checks in at just 7.6- x 8.3- x 11.4-inches, and it's available for order right now starting at $799."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This is getting rather repetitive, but it seems that industry execs and lobbying groups who hate the fact that they have to "compete with free" consistently like to trot out tired old (and inaccurate) lines about how "you can't make money if everything's free." Except that's a total strawman. The latest to do this is Eric Baptiste, head of the International Confederation of Authors and Composers Societies (CISAC). In an interview with The Register, Baptiste repeatedly claims "there is no business if everything is for free." It's the kind of statement everyone has to agree with... minus the fact that it's totally meaningless. No one is suggesting that everything be free. What people are suggesting is that there are some things that it makes sense to offer for free, and some things that it makes sense to charge for. The trick (and it's really not that tricky) is understanding which is which. But, rather than helping folks like Baptiste are misleading their own constituents by making statements claiming that we're moving to a world where "everything is free."

What's funny is he even seems to implicitly realize this with his next statement:

When you listened to commercial radio or watched the BBC or bought CDs, all those things are paid for one way or another - not always by the public directly, but advertising and payment and license fee all created a stream of money. Licenses are being granted and the authors are being compensated, it's a real economy. When you move from this to nothing, to "everything is free", that's not a real economy. And nobody knows how to make the world spin with those rules.

The first part is exactly right. Not everything is paid for by the consumer directly. But the second part is dead wrong. No one is suggesting any business model where "everything is free." Everyone's been focusing on ways to take some stuff as being free and use it to make other stuff more valuable and worth paying for. And it's working. So why is Baptiste pretending that people are pushing "everything is free"? It's because the new business models upset the apple cart for an organization like CISAC, which wants to create a big collective licensing deal (collective licensing is easy, compared to actually giving people a reason to buy).

His real fear isn't that "everything is free," because that's not happening at all. His real fear is that the new business models don't require groups like CISAC. But, of course, he gets away with it, because reporters never seem to challenge completely bogus statements like that we're heading into a world where "everything is free."

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Georg Greve, founder and president of the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE), has an insightful look at FOSS from a brand perspective with urgings that the community come together and strengthen open source as a unified brand. "There are plenty of false enemies to go around. Ironically, the most common form of false enemy is found around the animosity that has built around branding and framing issues, more specifically in the area of "Free Software" vs "Open Source." Name-calling and quarreling on either side is not helpful, and serves to hide the common base and interest in having a strong brand and powerful message. The historical facts around Free Software are well documented and available to anyone who wishes to look them up. But instead of focussing on past insults and wrongs, I believe our focus should be on the future. We should realize that what divides us pales in comparison to what we have in common and that division and exclusion are harmful to us all. So we should reign in the name-callers on either side, and empower those people who know how to build cooperation, corporations, and positive feedback loops."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In my previous post, I presented some background on the green building where the SPARK Project #1 is being installed, and I discussed the basic signals that need to be measured for the project. In order to create inputs into my smart home dashboard, I need to measure temperature and humidity, both indoors and out, photovoltaic array output, solar thermal usage, and grid-tied energy input. I described how temperature, humidity, and photovoltaic output were going to be measured.

The local utility has already installed devices that measure natural gas usage and grid-tied electricity consumption, but they don't provide the homeowner any way to read these measurements in real time. As with any dashboard, it's pretty important that the information displayed is as close to real time as possible. Imagine trying to optimize the efficiency of your car based on monthly reports. It can be done, but it's difficult to understand the impact of each change to the system. Electric and gas meters may be available with outputs suitable for monitoring, but I don't think most hobbyists have the option of retrofitting their homes. Fortunately, better and less intrusive options do exist.

Read further on the SPARK Project blog to see how the remaining signals will be measured.

More:
SPARK Project #1, Post #1
Sponsored projects series with Windows Embedded CE

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

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Now that the industry is winding down after another E3, it's time to reflect on the relative success of the show. Paul Govan reflects with a GeekDad view of the "winners" of this years show. The question is, after the attempts to scale it back to a much more exclusive event has E3 managed to escape obscurity and defeat at the hands of up-and-comers like PAX? Highlights of the show included Microsoft's new controller-less interface, a sexier PSP, and a myriad of releases from Nintendo.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Palm Pre launches at Sprint this Saturday, and you've probably been seeing an increasing amount of buzz on the subject [that is a Google search link, and today will show buzz, but if you're reading this later, will be meaningless]. I wrote about the Pre on Techdirt after being very impressed with the phone at CES and MWC Barcelona. I wrote, "I'm not sure when the bandwagon is going to hit the trail for this device, but I'm saddling up right now." And in the intervening months, I've noted that more and more reviewers were, like me, heaping praise on the device. But there was something else: many reviewers couched the endorsement of the Pre with caveats. At the end of every glowing article was a conclusion that seemed out of sync with the review. Here were mine, "I can't predict whether the developer community will rally around the Pre, or whether Sprint and Palm will be successful in selling big volumes, but I want to call this one early: the Pre is a great smartphone." Walt Mossberg at the WSJ wraps up his glowing review with, "All in all, I believe the Pre is a smart, sophisticated product that will have particular appeal for those who want a physical keyboard. It is thoughtfully designed, works well and could give the iPhone and BlackBerry strong competition -- but only if it fixes its app store and can attract third-party developers."

The caveats were reasonable. Developers have limited resources, and collective uncertainty in Palm and Sprint performance has us hedging our bets. Sure, we could assert that the device is great, but we could not be sure if the ecosystem would grow around it. But I think I'm in a better position to do that now. When 98 out of every 100 reviews say the device is great, isn't that one hell of a consensus? I haven't seen that kind of agreement in this industry since AFTER the launch of the iPhone. That's exactly the kind of community consensus that seeds an ecosystem. I officially retract my hedge. What content developer wouldn't be at least attracted to a device that gains such consistently high grades? Is it just hype? No. A landslide of positive reviews from people who actually tested isn't hype - it's straight As. That's good news for Palm, good news for consumers in that we get another competitive device to run alongside the iPhone, but only marginally good news for Sprint. Verizon took the wind out of Sprint's sales [sic] by announcing they, too would carry the Pre by year end, and AT&T is rumored to want a GSM version.

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

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I'm really happy that I caught a performance by Isaac "Shovelman" Frankle at Maker Faire. It's amazing what you can do with a shovel, a few pedals, and a lot of talent. Check out Shovelman on MySpace. Hopefully he will have a CD soon! See you at the next Maker Faire!

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var digg_url = 'http://digg.com/arts_culture/Maker_Faire_Bay_Area_2009_video_montage_featuring_Shovelman';

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In her latest One More Go column for Offworld, Margaret Robertson murders Steven Spielberg. Three dozen times she murders him, for his appearance at E3 and his "increasingly asinine - and frankly pretty arrogant - repetition of the 'games won't be important until they can make you cry, which up until now they haven't been able to, but don't worry I've come to fix things' line", as she otherwise looks at the game she can't stop returning to, Intelligent Qube, which she proclaims is the 'Modern Times' of videogames. Elsewhere, 5th Cell's DS game Scribblenauts, in which the player can conjure, well, just about anything simply by writing in its name, solves the immortal "God vs. Kraken vs. Keyboard Cat" debate, and Metal Gear producer Hideo Kojima takes on Konami's Castlevania franchise, with a newly announced Xbox 360/PS3 version that could be the 3D 'vania we've always been waiting for. And we sum up a number of the DS and Wii games that went undermentioned at Nintendo's E3 conference: the WiiWare port of gold-standard indie platformer Cave Story, the gorgeously serene 'gaming's version of the bedtime story', Night Game (above), twisted indie platformer And Yet It Moves announced for WiiWare, the Kid Icarus-esque WiiWare game Icarian, and the possible localization of the brilliant DS logic puzzler Picross 3D. Finally, Fez creators Polytron unveil their latest retro-future logo for Infinitron Polypharma, which can only mean that work steadily continues on Power Pill, their iPhone collaboration with Paper Moon creators Infinite Ammo.

As we discussed last February, and again a few days ago after the Washington Post noticed, Microsoft installed without permission a hard-to-remove Firefox extension along with a service pack for .NET Framework 3.5. Reader Pigskin-Referee lets us know that, as it turns out, Microsoft issued a fix a month ago; details here.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

My friend and yours Gareth Branwyn heard I was testing the Epilog Zing laser cutter and asked if I could cut him the parts for a 4Volt Jansen Walker. Gar is a robot master and a steampunk to the core (check out his Lost Technology issue of Make: magazine for more proof) so I figured clear acrylic wouldn't do it. He needed a wooden walker! I'm going to convince him to purchase brass nuts and bolts for the built, and maybe he can use small steam engines instead of servos and swap in a Babbage Machine for the Arduino...

I downloaded the parts files from Thingiverse, pulled them into Corel Draw, prepped them on a single 16" x 12" page, and fired it off. After about 20 minutes of cutting (OK, I was just sipping a cocktail watching it cut) the parts were all done. If you look closely there are some strange curves that became segmented or non-tangent. It turns out a single bolt in the laser optics assembly had wiggled loose. I paused the cutting, tightened the bolt, and the remaining cuts were perfect. I kind of hope these anomalies will enhance the organic nature of the design.

We'll have to bug Gar to pick up the story from here once I ship the parts to him!

Here's the original, inspiring, wonderful, otherworldly Jansen Walker that inspired Mr. 4Volt.

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Putumayo World Music launched their blog with an interesting collection of interviews about the "universal appeal of kids music." They spoke with DJ Spooky, Lila Downs, and Herbie Treehead. From the Putumayo blog:

Why do you think children’s music has such a universal appeal?

Paul Miller aka DJ Spooky: “Something about children’s music plays on the innocence and openness that children have. You can’t listen to kids music without a sense of wonder at the simplicity. I think children’s music is catchy precisely because it is about memory - we always strip memory down to its most essential components. That’s why people like “riffs” - it’s a way of simplifying and connecting fragments, just like sampling.”

Official Blog Launch & Kickoff Post: DJ Spooky, Lila Downs and Herbie Treehead Discuss Kids Music!

Woah, I never knew solenoids could be this good at impersonating audio oscillators! -- plus I had no idea copy machines had such advanced easter eggs. Dspdude explains -

This test fixture for a photocopier uses solenoids that are driven by a special song. Reminiscent of the Honda commercial for the early 80's. The easter egg is initiated through the Diagnostic interface, and the solenoids are driven over the CAN bus.

FYI - Originally designed for use in vehicles, the CAN (controller–area network) bus allows onboard microcontroler to chit-chat with each other within system hardware (thanks Wikipedia). And when there's no good gossip about toner levels and paper jams, I guess they have band practice?

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peretzpup writes "The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that Thomson Reuters's lawsuit against George Mason University has been dismissed. Last fall the news organization had sued GMU's Center for History and New Media over supposed violations of the EndNote licensing agreement by the Zotero project, hosted at the university. Zotero, a Firefox plug-in designed to help scholars store and organize their online research, has seen millions of downloads. Zotero project co-director Sean Takats's announcement is pretty heartwarming. No comment as yet from Thomson Reuters."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Hilary Rosen was the head of the RIAA for many years, and led the RIAA's attack on Napster and other early file sharing systems. She resigned in 2003, just before the RIAA began its campaign of suing individuals for file sharing, though long after the strategy had been decided upon and put in place. Since she left the RIAA, she surprised people by saying a lot of things that seemed to go against her former views -- including throwing some support behind Creative Commons, admitting that music interoperability was important (something the labels fought against for a long time) and then came her rather surprising admission that she believed suing file sharing platforms was a dead end strategy and that she hated DRM -- and then even admitting that this has always really been a business model issue, rather than a legal issue. Of course, what she ignored is that she helped make that so.

Billboard is now running an interview with Hilary Rosen to discuss "10 years since the Napster decision" and she's equally forthright, complaining about the many, many mistakes that the industry has made:

The one lesson the industry did not learn after Napster was speed. When you're talking about technology, you have to move quickly on opportunities. The constant refrain is 'there's no money in these opportunities. There's no advances. We don't see the pay off.' But the thing you have to keep pushing back on is 'what are you comparing it to?' If you're comparing it to physical sales or comparing it to an iTunes download, then you're right, it's going to be hard. But what you really need to compare to is how else fans are getting the music, which is free. The lessons of Napster, of rapid fire adoption, have been too quickly forgotten. The industry has moved a little too slow and have not benefited as much as they might have by the benefits of technology.

She does a little to defend the RIAA by noting, accurately, that:

I think the RIAA became the central organizing vehicle for people's anger. But they don't work for the consumers. They work for the industry. It's the business leaders in the industry that are calling the shots there.

That's absolutely true, of course. But it leaves out the fact that the RIAA itself has always promoted the idea that it does represent the best interests of music itself, including for the consumer. And that was true when Rosen was there as well. So whenever politicians or the press want to understand what's happening in the music world, they look for a quote from the RIAA, not recognizing that it's a very twisted view -- one focused on protecting a business model used by a single set of companies in the industry.

Either way, it's a worthwhile read, though it reminds you how little the industry did back when it actually could have embraced the future.

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Instructables user agent036 made this simple acoustic replica of a Vulcan lyre from Star Trek and broke down the steps to show you how, too.

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Here's an easy hack for your Maker's Notebook that's sure to get noticed: Buy some thermochromic liquid crystal (LC) film and attach it to the cover! Originally I bought LC film from US suppliers and tried gluing it on. I tested three different adhesives (3M Super77, DAP Weldwood Contact Cement, and Elmer's Craft Glue) and ruined one notebook and several pieces of film before discovering this self-adhesive LC film available from MUTR in the United Kingdom. (The 30x45cm size is necessary.) It works great! I cut two rectangles [5 3/8" (13.65 cm) x 6 7/8" (17.46 cm)] using a swing arm paper cutter, peeled off the protective backing, and carefully smoothed the film in place on both front and back covers, first with my fingers, and then using a rolling pin. See the video for some cool thermochromic effects.

Subscribe to the MAKE podcast in iTunes, or download the m4v file.

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niktemadur writes "In light of an Air Comet pilot's report to Air France, Airbus, and the Spanish civil aviation authority that, during a Monday flight from Lima to Lisbon, 'Suddenly, we saw in the distance a strong and intense flash of white light, which followed a descending and vertical trajectory and which broke up in six seconds,' the Cosmic Variance blog team on the Discover Magazine website muses on the question 'What is the probability that, for all flights in history, one or more could have been downed by a meteor?' Taking into account total flight hours and the rate of meteoric activity with the requisite mass to impact on Earth (approximately 3,000 a day), some quick math suggests there may be one in twenty odds of a plane being brought down in the period from 1989 to 2009. Intriguingly, in the aftermath of TWA flight 800's crash in 1996, the New York Times published a letter by Columbia professors Charles Hailey (physics) and David Helfand (astronomy), in which they stated the odds of a meteor-airplane collision for aviation history up to that point: one in ten."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

MAKE contributor Mikey Sklar has posted a how-to on Voltaic about using the solar power company's 15-watt panel to charge a 12v battery, for use in camping, festivals, powering personal electronics, etc.

Charge Car Batteries with a Voltaic 15 Watt panel

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When eBay first bought Skype we were among the many, many, many people left scratching their heads wondering where the supposed "synergies" were. We were told two things. First, that Skype had many users in China who would now suddenly start using eBay for auctions. Why? No one knows. In reality it had almost no effect. Just because you make calls via a software program it doesn't make you any more interested in doing online auctions through its parent company, apparently. Second, it would now allow buyers and sellers to communicate by voice. But why would they want to? Sure, maybe in a very rare case it might be helpful, but one of the advantages of an online auction system like eBay is that you don't need to actually talk to the other party. And if it was that important to talk, the buyer and seller could just agree to use Skype on their own without eBay spending billions. And, in fact, studies showed that this "feature" wasn't wanted by most eBay users.

But, still, in an effort to show that there really (no, really, really!) were some synergies, eBay integrated Skype into online auctions. Of course, now that eBay has finally admitted that there really were no synergies, taken a huge writedown on the investment and is looking to spin off Skype, the company is finally removing the integrated Skype buttons on auctions, and are even admitting that the company is involved "in an effort to remove features with limited buyer and seller usage." Was it really that hard to recognize how little synergies there were before spending multiple billions of dollars?

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schrodingers_rabbit writes "Despite formidable odds, condensed matter physicists have made a breakthrough most thought impossible — finding a practical use for string theory. The initial breakthrough was made by physicist and cosmologist Juan Maldacena. His theory states that the known universe is only a 2D construct in anti-de-Sitter space, projected into 3 dimensions. This theory manages to model black holes and quantum theory congruently, a feat that has eluded scientists for decades; but it fails to correspond to the shape of space-time in the known universe. However, it does predict thermodynamic properties of black holes, including higher-dimensional viscosity — the equations for which elegantly and almost exactly calculate the behavior of quark-gluon plasma and other superfluids. According to Jan Zaanen at the University of Leiden, 'The theory is calculating precisely what we are seeing in experiments.' Unfortunately, the correspondence cannot prove or disprove string theory, although it is a positive step." Not an easy path to follow: one condensed matter theorist said, "It took two years and two 1000-page books of dense mathematics, but I learned string theory and got kind of enchanted by it. [When the string-theory related] thing began to... make predictions about high-temperature superconductors, my traditional mainstay, I was one of the few condensed matter physicists with the preparation to take it up."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

From the MAKE Flickr pool

Mark of Spikenzie Labs points out this unusually styled musical interface/instrument posted by Flickr member juhani_. It sports some interesting controls with nice organic-meets-electronic aesthetics. The wheel controls along its length seem to be vertical rotary encoders.

Not much pertinent info to be gleaned from his blog, but it seems that sometimes the Sormina can be used in place of a tasty cyborg sandwich! -

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An anonymous reader writes "As a follow-up to our previous discussion, Sun appears to have quietly edited the Java 6u14 release notes language to say now: 'G1 is available as early access in this release, please try it and give us feedback. Usage in production settings without a Java SE for Business support contract is not recommended.' So does this mean it was all one huge typo? Or was Oracle/Sun tentatively testing the waters to see the community's reaction? In either case it's nice to see Java's back on the right path."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A fast moving look at the best of Maker Faire 2009. If you love to MAKE, create, learn, invent, CRAFT, recycle, act up, think, play and be inspired by celebrating arts, then start making plans for the next Maker Faire.

Next week: A new series of Weekend Projects from Maker Faire begins!

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As Primus tells us: "Jerry was a race car driver." Jeri Ellsworth was both a race car driver and a race car designer. In this segment from a Fat Man & Circuit Girl episode, she talks about the concept behind Watt's linkages she used in a rear suspension system she designed and how this mechanical linkage could be used in rapid prototyping/CNC machines to achieve precision positioning using much less expensive parts.

The linkage model she has in the video might be hard to understand. This animation on Wikipedia might make it easier.

BTW: I finally got to meet my new idol at Maker Faire, but alas, I did not get to hear her talk or to see her booth where she had her Easy Bake Chip Fab set up. I was there to see her present her "homebaked" solar cells to Jérôme Demers, Solarbotics' intern (and MAKE Contributor), for him to build them into a BEAMbot. Can't wait to see what he does with them.

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Stinky Litter Box writes "WWL-TV in New Orleans reports that the Louisiana House voted 81-9 on Thursday to propose that a '15-cent monthly surcharge should be levied on Internet access across Louisiana to fight online criminal activity.' Can you say 'slippery slope?' The good news is that Gov. Jindal opposes such a tax. Full disclosure: I grew up in south Louisiana and worked for WWL-TV in the late '70s."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

From the 'Ible author who brought you the Legway and the "Universe Cycle" comes the SteamRoller Riding Contraption, a sort of pedaling two-person porch swing.

The SteamRoller Riding Contraption

More:
Introducing: the Legway

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Android seems to be popping up on everything these days. Netbooks, set-top boxes, embedded devices, washing machines, E-Ink displays, you name it. Of the many available solutions out there it seems that some folks are having great success with OMAP-based solutions such as Gumstix and the Beagle Board. The combination of low power and high performance delivers reasonably efficient Android-based solutions that fit well in tight spaces.

One thing that impressed me in the above videos is Android's ability to adapt to the display. Full-screen web browsing seems right at home on the Beagle Board connected to an external monitor.

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The British government has been working on its "Digital Britain" report, which covers a range of tech issues, including copyright and file-sharing. Earlier drafts of the report basically seemed like a proxy for the recording industry, as the government looked to set up an agency run by the industry itself to police copyright infringement. One of the industry's goals has been for the government to deputize ISPs, and force them to keep tabs on their customers' activity and take steps to cut down on illegal downloading and file-sharing. The ultimate goal of the British recording industry, like its counterparts elsewhere, was to see the country adopt a three-strikes system that would see persistent infringers booted off ISPs' networks. But a government minister has implied the final Digital Britain report won't back a three-strikes plan, and will likely include new (and undefined) "technical solutions" to be determined by the UK's communications regulator, alongside mandating that ISPs send out notification letters to illegal downloaders. There is speculation that these technical solutions will involve speed caps on infringing users, which sounds like a less bad plan than three strikes -- but it's still not clear why the government, or ISPs, need to get involved to help prop up the recording industry's faltering business models.

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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Dan Kegel (who admits to being a Chrome developer) writes to point out a post from Mike Smith and Karen Grunberg, Product Managers for Google Chrome, with some good news for non-Windows users who want to play with Chrome: "In order to get more feedback from developers, we have early developer channel versions of Google Chrome for Mac OS X and Linux (for a couple of different Linux distributions), but whatever you do, please DON'T DOWNLOAD THEM! Unless of course you are a developer or take great pleasure in incomplete, unpredictable, and potentially crashing software." (The announcement continues below.)

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple has released a Digital Camera RAW Compatibility Update for Aperture 2, iPhoto '08 and iPhoto '09. Update 2.6 supports RAW files from the Canon Digital Rebel T1i (EOS 500D in Europe and EOS Kiss Digital X3 in Japan), Nikon D5000 and Olympus E-30 digital SLRs. The update is available for immediate download from Apple's website.

Much like the Arduino Starter Kit before it -- but better! Bridging the gap between the "real world" and your computer, the Advanced Arduino Starter Kit from the Maker Shed takes you further into the world of physical computing. We've included all sorts of cool electronic parts this time, along with our best selling Making Things Talk book by Tom Igoe, that help you delve deeper into the true capacity of the Arduino. You'll experience what the tens of thousands of engineers, designers, artists and hobbyists already know about this awesome and educational prototyping platform.

More about the Advanced Arduino Starter Kit

In the Maker Shed:


Make: Arduino

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Almost all of the issues facing broadband in this country (our slow speeds and high prices relative to other countries, questions about "neutrality" and things like customers being forced into broadband tiers) are really symptoms of a lack of significant competition in many markets. Many customers really only have one or two options, neither of which they like (I'm in that camp myself). Yet, the broadband providers want to make everyone believe it's a really competitive market. That's why they've done everything possible to block the FCC from getting accurate data about actual broadband deployments and competition over the years. Their most recent plan has been about pitching the idea of an organization called "Connected Nation" to "map" broadband penetration. However, as has been discussed previously, Connected Nation seems more like a front for the big telcos to try to pretend there's significant competition... and an increasing number of doubts are being raised about Connected Nation's efforts -- even as it seems to remain a darling of DC politicians. However its "mapping" still won't look at house-by-house penetration and competition (by demand from the broadband providers) and the collected data will remain proprietary, rather than open.

Meanwhile, Verizon has put up a video claiming to explain why there's plenty of competition in broadband in the US, but it does so by pulling a neat little trick: rather than defining the market as DSL and cable providers, it dumps wireless providers into the mix... So when you add mobile data providers, yes, there are more players in the space, but that ignores the fact that (1) many of the mobile players and broadband players are actually connected (i.e., AT&T has both, as does Verizon) and (2) that the cellular wireless broadband providers are all greatly limited, and use terms of service that tend to forbid using the data account as a primary connection. In other words, they're not really part of the same market at all.

But, most importantly, the video fails to back up its thesis that the US is "one of the most successful broadband markets in the world." It says there's lots of competition, investment in new technologies and consumers are getting more as prices go down. That suggests there is, in fact, some competition in the market -- a point pretty much everyone agrees on. But it does nothing to compare the US to other markets around the world that have much more competition, much more investment and much greater consumer value per dollar spent. Just saying that because there's some competition, the US is one of the most successful in the world, doesn't back up the thesis at all. It's like saying that you won a baseball game because you fielded nine guys. You forgot about the actual game.

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R3d M3rcury writes "The Lunar X-Prize is a contest offering $20 million to the first private organization to land and maneuver a robotic rover on the moon. There is also a $1 million bonus to anyone who can get a picture of a man-made object on the moon. But one archeologist believes that 'The sites of early lunar landings are of unparalleled significance in the history of humanity, and extraordinary caution should be taken to protect them.' He's concerned that we may end up with rover tracks destroying historic artifacts, such as Neil Armstrong's first bootprint, or that a mistake could send a rocket slamming into a landing site. He calls on the organizers to ban any contestant from landing within 100KM of a prior moon landing site. Now he seems to think this just means Apollo. What about the Luna and Surveyor landers? What about the Lunokhod rovers? Are they fair game?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

DC is apparently riddled with secret fiber-optics carrying national security stuff -- and it's maintained by a gang of Men In Black in black SUVs who will show up at a fiber break in minutes and send you and your backhoe to Gitmo if you're unlucky enough to break one of the unmarked conduits.

Within moments, three black sport-utility vehicles drove up, a half-dozen men in suits jumped out and one said, "You just hit our line."

Whose line, you may ask? The guys in suits didn't say, recalled Aaron Georgelas, whose company, the Georgelas Group, was developing the Greensboro Corporate Center on Spring Hill Road. But Georgelas assumed that he was dealing with the federal government and that the cable in question was "black" wire -- a secure communications line used for some of the nation's most secretive intelligence-gathering operations...

Black wire is one of the looming perils of the massive construction that has come to Tysons, where miles and miles of secure lines are thought to serve such nearby agencies as the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the National Counterterrorism Center and, a few miles away in McLean, the Central Intelligence Agency. After decades spent cutting through red tape to begin work on a Metrorail extension and the widening of the Capital Beltway, crews are now stirring up tons of dirt where the black lines are located.

Metro Dig at Tysons Stirs Underground Intrigue (via Schneier)

Here's a treasure-map showing the relationships of C++ and its many offshoots, proponents, clones and pretenders.

????? C++

Coral Cache mirror of map

(Thanks, Fipi Lele!)

James sez, "The web site Skin Deep covers the issues related to the lack of oversight regarding the safety of cosmetics:"

Skin Deep is a safety guide to cosmetics and personal care products brought to you by researchers at the Environmental Working Group.

Skin Deep pairs ingredients in more than 42,000 products against 50 definitive toxicity and regulatory databases, making it the largest integrated data resource of its kind. Why did a small nonprofit take on such a big project? Because the FDA doesn't require companies to test their own products for safety.

A sample listing:

AMERICAN BEAUTY DOUBLE LUSH MASCARA PLUS PRIMER (ALL SHADES)

Ingredients in this product are linked to:

Cancer
Developmental/reproductive toxicity
Violations, restrictions & warnings
Allergies/immunotoxicity
Other concerns for ingredients used in this product:
Neurotoxicity, Endocrine disruption, Persistence and bioaccumulation, Organ system toxicity (non-reproductive), Multiple, additive exposure sources, Irritation (skin, eyes, or lungs), Enhanced skin absorption, Contamination concerns, Occupational hazards, Biochemical or cellular level changes

The level of detail is amazing.

Skin Deep: Cosmetic Safety Reviews (Thanks, James!)

ThinkGeek's Crawling Zombie Torso Gelatin Mold is just what every elegant dinner party needs, especially if you make an aspic-and-baby-marshmallow gelatin salad with it.

Crawling Zombie Torso Gelatin Mold (Thanks, Alice!)

I'm not sure what's so "supreme" about the Jabba the Hutt Supreme Edition Costume, but man, you would certainly play some pretty weird "naughty Hutt and stern bounty hunter" scenes with it.

Jabba the Hutt Supreme Edition Costume (via Wonderland)

It's pretty easy to find examples of bad statistics, whether they stem from poor data collection or interpretation. But a writer over at the BBC thinks he's fingered the real culprit: people who respond to surveys incorrectly. While on one level, his claim may have a little bit of truth to it, it really seems like an abdication of responsibility for the media, who all too often don't check out the bogus stats they cite, or swallow manipulated data without much question. Furthermore, when many groups use push polls not just to collect data, but to influence opinions, it's hard to blame the average respondent too much. In short, bad responses to survey questions could be a problem -- but that doesn't excuse the people collecting the data, and especially the media reporting it, from ignoring the issue. If they know the data's inaccurate, why do they keep reporting it?

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

Kari in Austin has a very creative son, Sam. He's a "maker in the making," you could say. CRAFT contributing writer Rachel Hobson put me in touch with Kari for my weekly Ask MAKE column because she was looking for the perfect gifts to stock her son's birthday toolbox. Well, look how happy Sam is, and look at his awesome loot! Over on Flickr, she has a nice breakdown of what goes in the toolbox. Thanks to everybody that gave great suggestions for Sam's first toolbox!

More:

Ask MAKE: Kid's first toolbox

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A bunch of folks have been submitting the news that the FTC has shut down an ISP, called 3FN, known for actively recruiting scammers and spammers to use its services. The FTC noted "Anything bad on the internet, they were involved in it," and has pushed its upstream providers to cut off service. From the details, it sounds similar to the story from late last year when upstream service providers pulled the plug on another hosting firm, McColo (due to public pressure, not gov't intervention), and cut off huge amounts of spam, since so many spammers relied on botnets through McColo. While some scammers are apparently upset by 3FN going down, some folks are noticing that there doesn't seem to be a corresponding drop in spam as happened last time. Apparently, the spammers realized that having a single-point-of-failure wasn't a very good thing, and have built redundancy into their systems now. So, while many scammers and spammers did use 3fn, losing it hasn't been nearly as devastating as losing McColo. So, it's definitely reached that whack-a-mole stage, where taking stuff down makes for good press releases... but is it really stopping anyone?

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Michael_Curator writes "Gary Edwards, president of the now-defunct Open Document Foundation, helps sort out the challenges Google faces displacing Microsoft on the desktop, pitting the strengths of Microsoft's proprietary stack against the developer candy that HTML 5 represents."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Michael_Curator writes "Gary Edwards, president of the now-defunct Open Document Foundation, helps sort out the challenges Google faces displacing Microsoft on the desktop, pitting the strengths of Microsoft's proprietary stack against the developer candy that HTML 5 represents."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Recent court rulings have made it clear that sports leagues have overreached (by a long shot) in trying to force online fantasy sports sites to license player info. The courts have pointed out that player names and stats are factual information, not subject to copyright. Now, this has resulted in many fantasy sports sites to skip renewing any licensing deals. The NFL Players Assocation, despite already having lost such a case, still went to Yahoo and threatened it with a lawsuit over this issue. It appears Yahoo decided to be proactive and sued for a declaratory judgment that its uses of player info was not in violation. It's an aggressive move by Yahoo -- but it also shows (reasonably) that the company believes that it's likely to win (and, perhaps, that it was worried about whatever district the NFL PA would have filed its own lawsuit in). Either way, it's yet another chance to remind sports leagues that they don't get to copyright factual information.

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Looks like a piece of crap bike, right? Not quite. In MAKE Volume 11, Rick Polito showed us how to deter bike thieves by uglifying. It may look like an old clunker, but the bike above is actually Rick's Bianchi Milano, which rides like a dream. Here it is pre-makeover:

I love the analogy in the intro:

"Nature is the master of disguise. The tiger swallowtail caterpillar starts out camouflaged like a bird dropping to discourage birds from eating it. You can take a tip from the crawling turd and keep your bike from getting swiped by camouflaging it as a piece of crap: dress it down as a rolling piece of junk.Having an ugly bike doesn't mean having a junky bike. Looks and performance have no exclusive relationship. A savvy bike thief may see the gem under the Krylon, but he also knows he can't sell it as quickly as the tricked-out speedster at the other end of the bike rack."

Think paint (emphasize the sloppy factor), faux finish rust, accessories, tape, stickers, swapped out nuts and bolts. Check out the article here in our Digital Edition. And of course you can pick up a back issue of Volume 11, with our alt. vehicles special section, at the Maker Shed.

More:
Jimmie's uglified camera

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I will be in Detroit and Ann Arbor, Michigan next week talking about MAKE and meeting makers. If you're in the area, and you'd like to talk about MAKE and Maker Faire, or tell me about projects that you're doing, come by GO Tech June 9 at 7pm or the Ann Arbor District Library June 11th at 7pm. Both of which are open to everyone.

On Tuesday, June 9, I'll be at the June GO Tech (Ann Arbor, MI) meeting at 7 pm. The meeting will be held at A2 MechShop is at 240 Parkland Plaza, Suite B (in the back), Ann Arbor, MI 48103.

This will be an informal, interactive discussion. I hope to learn more about local makers and their interests. I will share some of the experiences from our recent Maker Faire. I expect the question to come up: how can we have a Maker Faire in the Detroit area?

GO Tech (formerly NotBAGO) is a meeting for Ann Arbor area readers of Make Magazine, Circuit Cellar, Home Shop Machinist, Kevin Kelly's Cool Tools, Slashdot, etc. That is, people who are interested in and make things using technology, whether that's a metal cutting lathe or a Python script. A kind of generalized mixture of CerealBar, Dorkbot, Oxford Geek night, and Portland Machinist Guild. We have machinists, electrical engineers, software folks, industrial control types, and so on. We share projects, information about tools and ideas, and connect with like-minded people.

Link to GO Tech Group.

On Thursday, June 11 at 7 pm, I'll be giving a talk on Make's current issue "ReMake America" and the value of DIY culture at the Ann Arbor District Library. I'll show a video from this year's Maker Faire. The address is 343 South Fifth Ave., Ann Arbor, MI.

In between, I'll be going to the Henry Ford Museum. At this difficult time for the American auto industry, I expect to learn a lot by looking back at its origins. I am dismayed by the factory closings and the number of workers who no longer have jobs there.

If you have any MAKE-related recommendations for the Detroit or Ann Arbor area, please let me know.

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(Bill Gurstelle is guest blogging here on Boing Boing. He is the author of several books including Backyard Ballistics, and the recently-published Absinthe and Flamethrowers)

35 years ago today, on June 4, 1974, one of the most infamous events in sports history occurred. In 1974, the Cleveland Indians played at the extremely capacious Municipal Stadium. Unfortunately, the '74 team was mediocre at best, so there weren't many fans (about 8000 was normal) and the place often looked deserted. The Cleveland brain trust hit on what they thought was a great idea to increase attendance - 10 cent beer night.

Well, beer night worked. Lots of people did show up, about 25,000 in fact. The Tribe took on the Texas Rangers that evening. The box score shows the Rangers surged to a 5-1 lead in the early innings. The fans took it harder than normal since they had been drinking cup after 10¢ cup of Strohs beer pretty much since the gates opened. According to Wikipedia:

. . . the crowd in attendance continually misbehaved. A woman ran out to the Indians' on-deck circle and flashed her breasts, and a naked man sprinted to second base as Grieve hit his second home run of the game. A father and son pair ran onto the outfield and mooned the fans in the bleachers one inning later. The ugliness escalated when Cleveland's Leron Lee hit a line drive into the stomach of Rangers pitcher Ferguson Jenkins, after which Jenkins dropped to the ground. The fans in the upper deck of Municipal Stadium cheered, then chanted "Hit 'em again! Hit 'em again! Harder! Harder!"

As the game progressed, more fans ran onto the field and caused problems. Ranger Mike Hargrove (who would manage the Indians and lead them to the World Series 21 years later) was pelted with hot dogs and spit, and at one point was nearly struck with an empty gallon jug of Thunderbird.

By the time the ninth inning rolled around, a full fledged riot broke out. Umpire Nestor Shylak, (my all time favorite umpire by the way) after dodging rocks and ripped out stadium seats forfeited the game to Texas.

There have been no more unlimited 10-cent beer nights since.

Bridging the gap between the "real world" and your computer, the Getting Started with Arduino kit from the Maker Shed is your starting point into the world of physical computing. Using the electronic parts included, along with our best selling Getting Started with Arduino book by Massimo Banzi, the co-founder of Arduino, you'll be ready to join the tens of thousands of engineers, designers, artists and hobbyists who have discovered this incredible and educational prototyping platform. Besides the DC plug and Battery pack, this kit requires no soldering whatsoever.

More about the Getting Started with Arduino Kit

In the Maker Shed:


Make: Arduino

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This isn't a huge surprise, but a judge has tossed out the ACLU and the EFF's various lawsuits against telcos for enabling warrantless wiretapping for the government. The reason it isn't a huge surprise is that the gov't last year, in a well publicized move, granted the telcos immunity from prosecution, and the judge basically pointed that out in dismissing the case. Instead, the judge said that if these groups have a complaint, it's with the gov't for granting immunity (not to worry, there are lawsuits against the gov't as well). Not surprisingly, the EFF and ACLU are appealing. Still, it does seem like these lawsuits are a longshot, even if it's disappointing. It seems ridiculous that the gov't can grant widespread immunity to a company for potentially breaking the law -- but, again, it seems that's an issue to take up with the government -- and once that's solved, go back and deal with the companies specifically. The judge's job is to interpret the law, and in this case, the law says that the telcos are immune. Now, if you believe (as I do) that such a law is ridiculous and should be seen as unconstitutional, than the issue is to take it up with the government. So, the judge's ruling makes sense, even if it's disappointing to see telcos potentially get off the hook for violating customer privacy rights.

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jhutkd writes "On June 3rd, 2009, ICANN and NIST announced formal plans to use DNSSEC to sign the DNS root zone by the end of 2009. This is a huge step forward for the deployment of DNSSEC."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.