btempleton writes "It was 20 years ago today when I posted to USENET the public launch of ClariNet, my electronic newspaper service delivered over the Internet. By finding a way around the NSFNet acceptable use policy, ClariNet was the first business founded to use the Internet as its platform for business, and the era of the 'dot-com' had begun. For the anniversary I have written a history of the founding of ClariNet and early internet business, which outlines how it all came down. Readers may also enjoy the included anecdote about what I term 'M5' reliability, where the news system was so robust that, like the M5 computer on Star Trek, even those authorized to do so were unable to shut it off; and a story of the earliest large SF eBook effort."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Last year, we wrote about the troubling lawsuit filed by Thomson Reuters claiming that George Mason University, the makers of an open bibliography software, Zotero, had violated its copyright by reverse engineering the file format used by Thomson Reuters' own proprietary bibliography software, EndNote. Zotero could open bibliographies created in EndNote and then resave them in an open format -- a very useful tool that should be perfectly legal -- but which Thomson Reuters claims violated its license agreement, which bars reverse engineering. Luckily, a judge has tossed out the lawsuit, though (as of right now) it's not entirely clear what the reason for the dismissal was (the ruling doesn't appear to be anywhere online, and the reports on it don't seem to have the details either). Hopefully, Thomson Reuters takes the hint and drops the case, but there's probably a half-decent chance that it will refile the suit or appeal. However, one hopes that the company realizes that felony interference with a business model isn't a crime, and reverse engineering has been held to be perfectly legal. Also, wouldn't it be nice if the company focused on competing by innovating on tools and features, rather than trying to sue competitors out of existence?

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John Swansburg wrote a piece for Slate about "orphaned tweets" ...

... that is, the tweets left behind by the people who sign up for Twitter, post once, then decide Twittering isn't for them and never log back in. Some of them are quite funny ("eating a miniature pie"), some are quite bizarre ("picking lint from Judy's naval while she is napping!"), and some are a little scary ("it hurts to breathe. should I go to the hospital?").

Thought BoingBoing readers might get a kick out of the examples; also, we're inviting readers to submit their own favorite orphan tweets -- I bet BoingBoingers have seen a good many such posts, and would love to hear about them.

Slate on favorite orphaned tweets

Guillermo Iao sent us a link to this project where he recycled a hard drive case into a bottom and a top for an Arduino-based DAC (digital audio controller) used as a preamp.

Reusing Hard Disk Parts for the Case

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An anonymous reader writes "Acer is planning to announce a 3D notebook computer by end of October. If Acer indeed comes out with a 3D laptop then it'll be the world's first manufacturer to do so. The most interesting thing about Acer's machine is that it requires no special glasses. The 15.6-inch notebook features built-in software which can convert regular 2D movies to 3D and directly support 3D movies." Update: 06/08 23:18 GMT by T : According to the linked story, the no-glasses version is still in the works; the current iteration does still require special glasses.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

While the US Supreme Court will soon be considering the question of software and business method patents (and the US Patent Office is still reviewing whether or not Amazon's "one-click patent" is valid), up North, the Canadian Patent Appeal Board (CPAB) appears to have resolved both issues by rejecting all software and business method patents in explaining why it's rejecting Amazon's one-click patent in Canada. Basically, the CPAB found that since software and business method patents haven't been allowed in the past, even if they're not explicitly forbidden by the patent law, it's such a big change that it should require legal action to allow them:

"since patenting business methods would involve a radical departure from the traditional patent regime, and since the patentability of such methods is a highly contentious matter, clear and unequivocal legislation is required for business methods to be patentable."

This actually makes a fair amount of sense. In the US, once the State Street case was decided, there was suddenly a mad rush to patent business methods and software, and part of the problem was that because so many people had considered the two unpatentable before, there wasn't the same set of prior art in the patent system that would have eliminated the worst abuses.

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The Summer 2009 issue of h+ magazine, edited by R.U. Sirius, looks terrific. Here's the story lineup:

Cover Stories

:: Designer Baby Controversy
:: From X Prize to Singularity U
:: Biohacking Arrives
:: Legalize Sports Doping?
:: Was That a Bot or a Human?
:: Chris Conte's Microbotic Art

Features:

:: Here Come the Neurobots
:: Real Discrimination Against Virtual People
:: The Man Behind Biosphere 2
:: Everything of the Dead: The Future of Humanity is Zombie
:: Life On Mars with Pete Worden

Summer 2009 issue of h+ magazine

The Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian is exhibiting 39 drawings "that chronicle the realities of contemporary Inuit life by renowned artist Annie Pootoogook." It open on June 13.

Pootoogook’s detailed work describes everyday life in her home community of Cape Dorset, Nunavut. Her scenes of Inuit traditions include the less romantic but real integration of modern technologies such as video games and televisions as well as domestic abuse and tragedy. Her method, carefully outlined shapes in black filled with blocks of solid color, recalls traditional Inuit drawing while the subject matter reflects the unvarnished viewpoint of her generation. Other drawings are more personal and abstract, illustrating an emotional landscape of mental anguish, such as “Sadness and Relief for My Brother,” and the austere but compelling, still life of the artist’s prescription- medicine bottle, cup and a single dangling key in “Composition (Annie’s Tylenol).” Cheerful domestic scenes such as a family opening Christmas presents (“Christmas”) are depicted with the same precision and calm attention to detail as the emotion-laden composition “Memory of My Life: Breaking Bottles.”

Annie Pootoogook’s Drawings of contemporary Inuit life

MonkeyClicker writes with mention of a proposal that could see an inflatable tower helping to carry people to the edge of space without the need for rocket propulsion. This would function in place of previous space elevator designs which featured a large cable and could be completed much faster, if proponents of the project are to be believed. "To stay upright and withstand winds, full-scale structures would require gyroscopes and active stabilization systems in each module. The team modeled a 15-kilometer tower made up of 100 modules, each one 150 meters tall and 230 meters in diameter, built from inflatable tubes 2 meters across. Quine estimates it would weigh about 800,000 tonnes when pressurized — around twice the weight of the world's largest supertanker."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Spike Priggen says:

Man, they loved those Beatles Medleys back in the 60's and 70's... Here, the Righteous Brothers and Nancy Sinatra tackle songs from "Rubber Soul" with predictable results (very lame but slightly amusing).

Righteous Brothers – "I've Just Seen A Face"
Nancy Sinatra & The Righteous Brothers – "Run For Your Life"
The Righteous Brothers – "Girl"
Nancy Sinatra & The Righteous Brothers – "Wait"
The Righteous Brothers – "Michelle"
Nancy Sinatra & The Righteous Brothers – "I've Just Seen A Face" (end of medley)

Hullabaloo Salute To "Rubber Soul"

Zadi Diaz interviewed Current TV correspondent Laura Ling for this episode of Rocketboom back in 2005. Ling and colleague Euna Lee were this week sentenced to 12 years hard labor by North Korea's high court, with no ability to appeal the ruling, and no direct diplomatic ties in place to help secure their release.

Here is an archive of Ling's work for Current. Some BB commenters have asked why no comment from the network, or its co-founder, Al Gore -- this Gawker post addresses the matter. My thoughts, and my most sincere hope for safety and release, go out to Ms. Ling and Ms. Lee, and their families.

Spike Priggen says:

I've spent the better part of the last couple weeks looking at Garage Rock videos and trying to compile the best quality ones I could find. I was really struck when I discovered this one, because it's just about the only one I could find (the other being The Monks on the German show "Beat Beat Beat") where the band is actually playing live and not just miming to the record. And they sound awesome. I'm no Garage expert but I 'm pretty sure that The Remains were one of the best Garage Bands, musicality-wise. They sound amazing here. (I should add that I'm talking about US Garage Bands, there's alot of great live video of Euro and UK Garage and Psych bands, mostly from the German TV show "Beat, Beat, Beat")

The Remains - "Let Me Through" (Live)

I'm late blogging these, I know everyone else discovered "literal music videos" a month ago. A quick YT search for "literal" turns up nearly 10,000 results, Rocketboom has already done a "Know Your Meme" on 'em, and here's a dedicated blog. But I'm fairly certain this is one of the more awesome specimens: TOTAL ECLIPSE SPOOF.

Because I love Radiohead, I love this one, too. Please post links to your favorites in the comments. (via Danny Sullivan and Laughing Squid)

An anonymous reader points out that Congress has quietly begun dismantling NASA's manned space flight program. "Other recommendations contained in the bill include a $77million reduction in NASA's proposed space operations budget, which includes the space shuttle and international space station; a $6 million reduction in science; and a $332 million shift in funds from the Cross Agency Support account to a new budget line-item included in the subcommittee's mark. Dubbed Construction and Environmental Compliance, the new account would be funded at $441 million. Congressional aides said the new line item and accompanying funds are aimed at consolidating NASA's various construction efforts into a single pot of money."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Late last year, we found it silly that three journalists were suing the NY Police Department, claiming their First Amendment rights were violated because the police refused to give them press passes. As we noted, freedom of the press doesn't mean that anyone has to give those journalists access. If I remember correctly, that case was eventually settled with the journalists being given press passes again, but a similar case in California has gone all the way to a ruling, with the court finding that the First Amendment does not automatically grant journalists access (via Romenesko). In this case, a photojournalist was trying to photograph a car accident scene, and police barred him from the scene and eventually handcuffed him. The judge found that while the press should be allowed to have the same access as the public had, the public isn't granted access to crime scenes, so it's entirely reasonable for the police to order the press away from a crime scene. Of course, there are separate issues here which weren't addressed, including that the police didn't just ask him to leave, but at one point said "You don't need to take these kind of photos." One could make an argument that statements like that could go over the line.

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Just a reminder about our Paper Yachts book contest, closing tomorrow at midnight PDT. Please add your comments below, or in the original post, if you want to be considered for the drawing.

More:
Paper Yachts book contest

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The Narrative Fallacy writes "Douglas Quenqua reports in the NY Times that according to a 2008 survey only 7.4 million out of the 133 million blogs the company tracks had been updated in the past 120 days meaning that "95 percent of blogs being essentially abandoned, left to lie fallow on the Web, where they become public remnants of a dream — or at least an ambition — unfulfilled." Richard Jalichandra, chief executive of Technorati, said that at any given time there are 7 million to 10 million active blogs on the Internet, but it's probably between 50,000 and 100,000 blogs that are generating most of the page views. "There's a joke within the blogging community that most blogs have an audience of one." Many people who think blogging is a fast path to financial independence also find themselves discouraged. "I did some Craigslist postings to advertise it, and I very quickly got an audience of about 50,000 viewers a month," says Matt Goodman, an advertising executive in Atlanta who had no trouble attracting an audience to his site, Things My Dog Ate, leading to some small advertising deals. "I think I made about $20 from readers clicking on the ads.""

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

For many, many years, we've pointed out how the fashion industry is an example of a highly creative industry that has thrived without the use of copyright. The industry itself is massively successful, incredibly innovative, and involves plenty of competition. This should be seen as a good thing. Yet, some big name designers, who were annoyed that they had to keep competing by releasing new designs all the time have been lobbying Congress to pass a new law that would institute a special copyright for fashion design. This makes little sense. The entire purpose of copyright is to encourage innovation. Yet, if the industry is thriving, competitive and innovative, why would you ever want to introduce new copyright?

Yet, as expected, there has been a big push to get the law passed this year. People have been submitting stories on a near weekly basis about how one or another celebrity designer trekked up to Capitol Hill to push starstruck Congress Critters to support the bill.

It's reached the point that many expect the bill to finally pass this year, but suddenly many in the industry are realizing what a disaster this would be. Boing Boing points us to a plea from industry insiders who are realizing how such a law would destroy the industry and force many small businesses and designers to shut down. Yet, when they talked to their Congressional reps, they were told that Congress hadn't heard anyone complain about this yet, so now they're trying to get out the word.

It might help them to present some of the economic research on this, including the studies that have shown how much the lack of copyright has helped the industry to thrive, and how much harm the addition of copyright would do to the overall industry. This research has been out there for years, but apparently the folks writing the laws would rather hang out with celebrities like Tim Gunn than actually do some research around what such a law would really mean for the industry.

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Tucked away on an unassuming industrial avenue in Toronto, Canada, is Roger Wood's Klockwerks. A self-identifying Steampunk clock-marker, Wood is a collector and fabricator of romantic artifacts and oddities. As an artisan of fantasy his work is an amalgamation of timepieces and neo-Victorian aesthetic. If you're familiar with the Klockwerks Chronulator, featured in Make: Online last December, this glimpse of his shop is a rare in-depth revisiting of a true Steampunk visionary.

For more photos of his shop check out the Flickr set.

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Lots of big news from WWDC today including updates to almost all of Apple's laptops. They added a 13-inch version to the MacBook Pro line, updated the MacBook Air, and added a few new ports to some of the machines including an SD slot and firewire 800 port. Software updates saw Safari 4 launched, OS X updates including threading changes, Exchange support to mail, calendar, and address book, and OpenCL a new open graphics standard. The iPhone got quite a bit of love in 3.0, much of it just confirming older news. Cut, copy, and paste, shake to undo, developer APIs, Cocoa Touch support for text, landscape mode updates, spotlight, and MMS all made the bullet list. You will now also be able to rent and purchase movies directly from your iPhone. Other new features in 3.0 include the much debated tethering ability, allowing you to use your iPhone as a cellular modem (unfortunately there was no mention of AT&T actually supporting this feature, a wonder there wasn't a riot), integrated TomTom GPS navigation, and game features galore. New functionality also allows you to locate your iPhone via MobileMe, play a sound to help you locate it (regardless if it is set to silent), and even wipe your data remotely. The New iPhone hardware updates, "3GS", adds a 3 megapixel auto-focus camera, voice interfaces, twice the processing power, and hardware encryption. The 3GS comes in 16GB ($199) and 32GB ($299), pushing the 3G (which they are keeping on the market) to $99. Lots of other small updates amidst the bustle, looks like another successful WWDC.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

(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. Twitter: @wmgurst)

UPDATE: This reminds me of the time I checked in a day late for 1 AM flight from LA to Minneapolis. Apparently, this happened last night.

Astronomy enthusiasts in North and South America will stay up light tonight to see the occultation of the bright red star Antares. (Non-astronomers may wonder what this means: the moon will pass in front of the star, so it's an eclipse of a star, more or less.) Antares is a bright red supergiant in the middle of the constellation Scorpio, and home to Fizzbinn. Here's a map of places where the event is visible and the website lists exact times.

Map from Pierpaolo Ricci's website.

I became interested in astronomy when I was eleven years old and read Sir Patrick Moore's book called The Sky at Night. The Sky at Night was a book that really made a difference to me. It takes a while, but with it, you can become familiar with nearly every bright object in the night sky.

In the first Exploring Your Own Backyard post, a few commenters thought it was incongruous to use a digital microscope to get closer to nature. My point is to get outside and explore nature firsthand, and if a modern digital device enhances the experience, so much the better.

To this point, I've been experimenting lately with a device called the SkyScout Personal Planetarium. It's about the size of smallish video recorder. If you point it at any star, planet, major deep sky object, etc, the readout on the side tells you what it is you're looking at. If it's a rather important object, it plays an audio excerpt with additional information. Conversely, you can select the name of a star or other object from a list and arrows on the display will guide you to it.

(Looks rainy tonight in here in Minneapolis - rats.)

Watch the entire 3 part series over at A Facemelting Blog of Staggering Riffage. (Via Mt. Holly Mayor's Office)

One of my favorite things at this year's Maker Faire was iFixIt's repair area. They had obviously worked their butts off to create a really cool environment conducive to teaching people about fixing their own cars, home appliances and electronics gear. They had awesome displays, like physical exploded view "diagrams" of handheld devices, using the actual parts in a stacked cube of Plexiglas. Really clever. Oh, and they had a Trebuchet that launched T-shirts. They're a really great group of folks, too, very passionate about what they're doing. I gave their booth one of my Editor's Choice ribbons. Well deserved.

On their website, their latest project is the launching of a site where users can post their own teardowns. If sites like Instructables offer a means by which anybody can post how to make something, this is a system for how to post about the process of unmaking things. It's exciting to think how a resource like this can be used by people to learn about the goings on inside the tech they use, what parts are involved, how to replace them, etc.

Kyle explains the new site:

We use a powerful home-grown documentation tool to write our repair manuals. Over the years that software has developed into a fast and efficient way to publish the Mac teardowns that we create. Our hardware teardowns and analysis have become world-renowned for providing a first look inside new hardware. Tons of people have asked us to publish their teardowns to our audience. This demand helped us realize the importance of releasing this platform for everyone, so we spent the last year polishing our tool and making it robust enough for anyone to create teardowns free of charge.

In the past we've focused primarily on Apple devices, but we've recently expanded and published a number of non-Apple teardowns. Our recent teardowns of the Nintendo DSi, Amazon Kindle 2, and Dell Adamo were massively popular and have been viewed by
hundreds of thousands of people.

The deviation from writing Mac teardowns foreshadowed today's epic announcement. We hope that people use our flexible teardown platform to create teardowns of devices of all kinds, not just Apple products.

We keep our website running fast. Over the course of dozens of large traffic events, we've learned a thing or two about handling large spikes in server traffic. Thanks to cloud computing and Amazon EC2, today we're able to dynamically scale our capacity to
meet demand.

Writing a teardown is simple, and we wrote a step-by-step guide to show people how it's done.

We are also proud to announce our first user-generated teardowns. Using our tool, PhoneWreck.com has published their detailed cell phone teardowns and circuit analyses in our easy to understand step-by-step format.

T-Mobile G1
BlackBerry Bold
BlackBerry Curve 8900
BlackBerry Storm
HTC Touch Pro
Motorola Krave
Nokia N95
Samsung Omnia i910
Sony Ericsson XPERIA X1

All of these teardowns are immediately available online.

We are absolutely thrilled to be launching our new site. This platform has been a labor of love for a long time, and we're excited to see what tinkerers all over the world create with it. Join us, and show the world what's inside your gadgets!

iFixit Teardowns

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Cartoonist Lucy Knisley went on a seven-day fast and drew a comic about it.

Her work is excellent. I recommend her book, Radiator Days.

Cartoonist Lucy Knisley's comic strip about a 7-day-fast (Via The Daily Cross Hatch)

eldavojohn writes "Stanislaw Lem was arguably the greatest non-English science fiction writer before his death three years ago and left behind many science fiction novels with messages of satire and intrigue. The Futurological Congress is no different. The book has several motifs throughout it but I found the most prominent to be that we are living in an increasingly medicated society whereby the future may be wonderfully dystopian--in that the horrors of our existence are simply hidden by drugs on top of drugs on top of drugs. With a movie due out shortly by director Ari Folman, it seems like a good time to revisit this often overlooked short classic sci-fi work." Read on for the rest of eldavojohn's review

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

* BB Video + PopSci: Frozen on Video: Theo Gray Sculpts in Solid Mercury, with Some Help from Liquid Nitrogen.
(Download) We team up with PopSci and Theo Gray to bring you this episode -- in which the MAD SCIENCE author shows you how to make delicious mercury-sicles shaped like fishies and turtles!

* "Tank Tour": One of World's Largest Collections of Historic Military Technology
(Download/YouTube) Guest-host Todd Lappin explores a massive collection of historical military vehicles tanks collected by an eccentric Silicon Valley multimillionaire.

* "Olé Cordobes," a 1966 Scopitone via Oddball Film + Video
(Download / YouTube) A video from a long-defunct "visual jukebox player" format tells the romantic tale of a Spanish bullfighter, with help from an Amy Winehouse lookalike and mustachioed Flamenco dudes bearing overwrought facial expressions.

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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."

You may recall a couple years back, a controversy over the fact that Sears appeared to be installing spyware on the computers of online customers who had agreed to join a "community." Sears insisted this wasn't true, and that it really was software to help create a community of shoppers -- but the evidence suggested otherwise. The FTC eventually got involved, and now Sears has settled the charges that it was unfairly spying on users without clearly indicating this to users. Sears insisted that because the fine print of the terms of service for joining the community said that it would track your online browsing, it was in the clear, but the FTC noted, accurately, that most users would not have gotten that impression from signing up. As Thomas O'Toole notes about this ruling:

I'm pretty sure that attorneys would understand the breadth of the consent covered by the phrase "online browsing." It means everything. The position taken by the FTC signals the agency's belief that consumers should not be treated like lawyers when it comes to privacy-related disclosures. The FTC also appeared to be concerned about the fact that the disclosure was buried in a lengthy privacy statement, which was displayed to the consumer rather late in the consent-collecting process.

This is a good thing. Customers shouldn't need to be lawyers to understand what it is they're agreeing to, and it's nice to see the FTC recognize that fact.

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I like this tattoo placed over a couple of fused together toes.

A large number of schools participating in a pay for grades program have seen test scores in reading and math go up by almost 40 percentage points. The Sparks program will pay seventh-graders up to $500 and fourth-graders as much as $250 for good performance on 10 assessment tests. About two-thirds of the 59 schools in the program improved their scores by margins above the citywide average. "It's an ego booster in terms of self-worth. When they get the checks, there's that competitiveness -- 'Oh, I'm going to get more money than you next time' -- so it's something that excites them," said Rose Marie Mills, principal at MS 343 in Mott Haven. Critics, who are unaware that most college students don't become liberal arts majors, argue that paying kids corrupts the notion of learning for education's sake alone.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

• Joel reviewed the Palm Pre. But first, he unboxed it reverently.

• The Pre's charger is, perhaps, just $5 of stuff sold for $70. Nonetheless, it's an amazing work of engineering.

• We spotted an ingenious and beautiful design for a steampunk thumbdrive.

• Maingear sells a PC with a superfluous map of futuristic city on the side.

• There was a Lego Ghetto Blaster Yoda.

• Reebok made a high-tech baseball bat.

• Behold! The Choculator.

• Olympus sneaked out a shot of its new retro Four Thirds camera.

• JVC announced what it claims is the world's thinnest 32" LCD display.

• We humbly request that someone autotune Jay-Z's latest, "Death to Autotune."

(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. Twitter: @wmgurst)

I'm into bullwhips. I make 'em, read about them, use them, and write about them. Being able to handle a bullwhip is an impressive skill. There's a section in Absinthe and Flamethrowers that covers the basics in terms of whip use and technique. If you don't think learning the bullwhip is Golden Thirdstuff, you haven't tried it.

The following movies are my Top Whip Movies, chosen for having characters known for their whip using skills. (Interested readers are invited to write me with their favorites. Whip experts will note that the movies below include both stockwhips and cat-O-nines, which are quite different from one another in purpose.)

1. All Indiana Jones Movies. My son Andy is a graduate student in archeology currently on a dig in Ghana. I gave him a bullwhip as an undergraduate. I wonder if he brought it, and if it could go as carry-on luggage?

2. Legend of Zorro ("Nobody leaves my tequila worm dangling in the wind,") Mask of Zorro, and the many other Zorros

3. King of the Bullwhip. This 1950 oater stars Lash Larue, the king of the bullwhip, hence the title.

4. Catwoman. Yes, a pretty bad movie, but it has Halle Berry in a tight leather outfit cracking a whip.

5. Blues Brothers. Jake Blues sings the theme from Rawhide in Country Bob's Bunker, while cracking a conveniently placed bullwhip.

6. Bullwhip (with Rhonda Fleming and Guy Madison.) GM is an underappreciated talent.

7. Mutiny on the Bounty. I seem to remember some sailors getting flogged.

8. Jailhouse Rock. I vaguely remember Elvis getting flogged.

9. The Ten Commandments. I also seem to remember some Israelites getting flogged. "I can flick a fly from my horse's ear without breaking his stride," - Vincent Price as he gently pets his whip in what I think is the best whip related scene from The Ten Commandments,

The CNN video shows a man standing on a street corner in Passaic, NJ. According to the story, a police car drove next to the man, and one of the officers instructed the man to zip up his sweat shirt (Apparently the police officer decided it was OK to abuse her authority to enforce her personal dress code on the man). The man complied with the request immediately and another officer jumped out of his car and ran to the man and proceeded to beat him senseless.

Imagine what officer friendly would have done to the man had he refused to zip his sweat shirt!

After the incident, police locked Holloway in a holding cell for the night and did not provide treatment for his injuries, according to Holloway's attorney, Nancy Lucianna. Those injuries included a torn cornea and extensive bruising to the left side of his body, she said.

The Passaic Police have filed three charges against Holloway: resisting arrest, disorderly conduct and wandering for the purpose of obtaining controlled dangerous substances.

The man, 49-year-old Ronnie Holloway, is mentally challenged. His attorney says his client's neighborhood walks are a "chief pastime."

New Jersey police officer pounds man on tape (Via The Agitator)

Aude Baron, the French journalist who interviewed "Tsimfuckis" for that article in Lepost.fr (article: French original / English robo-translation), wrote in to Boing Boing to say...

That's really cool to talk about this kid, with whom I exchanged few mails last week. Just one little thing. At the end of your post, you talk about his YouTube account. Here's what happened...

Justin's first YT acount was "Tsimfuckis". He closed it on June, 2nd because he was fed up with comments coming from the "haterz", as he calls them. But then, his friends and fans told him that it was too bad, that he should keep going on YouTube. So he opened another account with the nickname "Tsimfuckus" on June 3rd. So it's him who controls it.

You may have seen there is another "Tsimfuckis" account on YT, recently created. This one is not Justin's. It's a f*cking "haterz", and who announced Justin's death...

Justin is a real cool kid, and I hope he'll see your article, and the great reactions following it.

Previously: Justin (aka "Tsimfuckis," aka "Tsimfuckus," aka "chick3n little.")

Jason sez, "I took this photo of the groom's cake from my sister's wedding this past weekend. As you can see, the cake is adorned with giant, edible polyhedral dice. (I'm not sure what they are made out of, but the cake itself was chocolate and delicious.)"

d20 groom's cake (Thanks, Jason!)

It seems there's never a shortage of folks trying to get listed in the new feature about stupid criminals giving themselves away. We just had the bank robber who bragged about his escapades on MySpace, and now we have a story about a girl (under the legal drinking age) awaiting trial for vehicular homicide for driving drunk and killing a motorcyclist. Apparently, as a part of her bail while waiting for trial, she was not to drink alcohol or spend time with people drinking alcohol. So, now she's in a bit of trouble after authorities found photos of her drinking alcohol with college friends on Facebook. Apparently, she never thought anyone would notice. The judge, however, is now forcing her to wear a special ankle bracelet that senses alcohol in perspiration. Either way, once again, it's nice to see that for all the moral panic talk about the "harm" done by social networks, some law enforcement folks are using it to actually catch criminals.

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It looks as though the movie studios are at least trying to learn from past failures and others' success with the upcoming launch of Epix (beta starts today), an HD television channel and accompanying online 720p service. The good part about this service is, if you are lucky enough to have a television provider who decides to become a partner, you wont have to pay extra to get it. The main downside of course is if your cable company decides not to plug this service in you will have no way to subscribe. "Like Hulu, the Epix movie service is a joint venture formed by the content owners; in this case, the service is powered by the movie studios Lionsgate, Paramount, and MGM. The Epix TV network will air movies that are in the "pay-TV" window, those weeks before a film appears on DVD in which it is available on pay-per-view or HBO, among others."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It looks as though the movie studios are at least trying to learn from past failures and other's success with the upcoming launch of Epix (beta starts today), an HD television channel and accompanying online 720p service. The good part about this service is, if you are lucky enough to have a television provider who decides to become a partner, you wont have to pay extra to get it. The main downside of course is if your cable company decides not to plug this service in you will have no way to subscribe. "Like Hulu, the Epix movie service is a joint venture formed by the content owners; in this case, the service is powered by the movie studios Lionsgate, Paramount, and MGM. The Epix TV network will air movies that are in the "pay-TV" window, those weeks before a film appears on DVD in which it is available on pay-per-view or HBO, among others."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Horrible news for the families of Current TV correspondents Euna Lee and Laura Ling: North Korea's highest court has ruled that the two journalists are "guilty of illegal entry," and will be sentenced to 12 years hard labor. The women were arrested in March while working on a story near the border between North Korea and China.

NKorea sentences 2 US journalists to 12 years jail (AP)
Reporters get 12-year terms in NKorea (CNN)

Japan buzzword watch: "Herbivore Men." Not to be confused, I presume, with "vegan guys." Snip:

They are young, earn little and spend little, and take a keen interest in fashion and personal appearance -- meet the "herbivore men" of Japan. Author and pop culture columnist Maki Fukasawa coined the term in 2006 in a series of articles on marketing to a younger generation of Japanese men. She used it to describe some men who she said were changing the country's ideas about just what is -- a

Japan's 'herbivore men' -- less interested in sex, money (CNN, via @dannychoo)

Japan-based bloggers and authors Matt Alt and Hiroko Yoda filmed an amazing little documentary for National Geographic's Wild Chronicles about the troubles facing the endangered Japanese Giant Salamander.

"As a kid I dreamed of growing up to direct kaiju creatures on the silver screen," says Matt, "so getting this chance to stalk some real-life giant monsters in the wild was an incredible treat."

Called "oosanshouo" (OH-san-show-oh) in Japanese, anime fans may recognize these gentle giants as the inspiration for the huge salamander-creature that appears towards the end of Howl's Moving Castle and Ranka's super-kawaii smartphone pal from Macross Frontier, among many others.

SOS: Save Our Salamanders (altjapan)

MySociety's Tom Steinberg has a fantastic blogpost that goes beyond the normal whinge about how governments are clueless about the Internet. Entitled "What the government doesn't understand about the Internet, and what to do about it," it concludes with a section called "How the government can be on the side of the citizen in the midst of the great Internet disruption" that is an absolute barn-burner.

2. Seize the opportunity to bring people together. Millions of people visit public sector websites every day, often trying to achieve similar or identical ends. It is time to start building systems to allow them to contact people in a similar situation, just as they'd be able to if queuing together in a job centre, but with far more reach and power. This does open the scary possibility that citizens might club together to protest about poor service or bad policies, but given recent news, if you were a minister would you rather know about what was wrong as soon as possible, or really late in the day (cf MPs' expenses, festering for years)?

3. Get a new cohort of civil servants who understand both the Internet and public policy, and end the era of signing huge technology contracts when the negotiators on the government's side have no idea how they systems they are paying for actually work. Coming up with new uses of technology, or perceiving how the Internet might be involved with undermining something in the future is an essential part of a responsible policy expert's skill-set these days, no matter what policy area they work in. It should be considered just as impossible for a new fast-stream applicant without a reasonably sophisticated view of how the Internet works to get a job as if they were illiterate ( a view more sophisticated than generated simply by using Facebook a lot, a view that is developed through tuition ). Unfashionably, this change almost certainly has to be driven from the center.

What The Government Doesn't Understand About the Internet, and What To Do About It (via O'Reilly Radar)

Gotenosente writes "11-Year-Old Moshe Kai Cavalin has graduated from East Los Angeles Community College with a degree in astrophysics. "At a time when his peers are finishing 6th grade, this only child of a Taiwanese mother and an Israeli father is trying on a cap and gown preparing to graduate with a 4.0 from community college." The article continues with a quotation by the boy, hinting at his modesty, "I don't consider myself a genius because there are 6.5 billion people in this world and each one is smart in his or her own way." Daniel Judge, Cavalin's statistics professor says, "Most students think that things should be harder than they are and they put these mental blocks in front of them and they make things harder than they should be. In the case of Moshe, he sees right through the complications.""

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Gotenosente writes "11-Year-Old Moshe Kai Cavalin has graduated from East Los Angeles Community College with a degree in astrophysics. "At a time when his peers are finishing 6th grade, this only child of a Taiwanese mother and an Israeli father is trying on a cap and gown preparing to graduate with a 4.0 from community college." The article continues with a quotation by the boy, hinting at his modesty, "I don't consider myself a genius because there are 6.5 billion people in this world and each one is smart in his or her own way." Daniel Judge, Cavalin's statistics professor says, "Most students think that things should be harder than they are and they put these mental blocks in front of them and they make things harder than they should be. In the case of Moshe, he sees right through the complications.""

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The annual DIY robotics event is just a week away. Anyone can participate -- and that means you.

This years attendees come from Australia, Austria, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Egypt, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Iran, Japan, Mexico, Peru, Russia, South Korea, UK, and the United States. Can the UK's 5-time gold medalist "Ziggy" retain it's lead for an amazing 6th year? Will Brazil finally sweep the combat classes? Can Team USA regain the top spot in humanoid soccer, having lost a heartbreaking defeat to Austria?

The event will host over 70 different competitions, including 18 different events just for walking humanoids. Large scale combat robots will fight to the death behind bulletproof glass, thrilling the crowd with crashing, smashing, flame-throwing, and miscellaneous wanton destruction. The combat robots, weighing as much as 340 pounds, are what draws most people to the event, but many stay for the AI based sumo robots, soccer bots, and kinetic art that fills out the venue.

But that's not all - other events include kung-fu humanoids, hockey bots, fire fighting competitions, autonomous explorer bots (like the Mars Rovers!), art bots, bartending robots, and mechanical marvels that defy description! The newest event is "Mech Warfare." Humanoid robots with bb cannons and rockets with try to take each other down, while the pilots control them remotely via in-robot cameras, with no look at the field from above.

Robogames: Friday-Sunday, June 12-14, 2009, Fort Mason, San Francisco. Kids under 7 get in free, tickets for everyone else range from $15-20 per day. I've witnessed their events before, and the Robogames folks always put on an amazing show. Well worth the modest ticket price. (Image courtesy Robogames)

(Cupcake CNC image from MakerBot Industries)

Bruce Wattendorf is organizing a weekend of RepRap and MakerBot hacking at AS220 Labs, 115 Empire Street, Providence RI on June 12, 13, and 14:

The team will be building a MakerBot, a DIY open source 3D printer. The build will be organized as a series of sessions, so you can help AS220 build a MakerBot and learn about electronics, 3D printing, and the design of the bot. The meeting will kick off Friday night, June 12 at AS220 Labs (2nd floor) from 7-8:30pm to come up with a schedule for the weekend.

There's no charge for this summit, but you can help AS220 by entering in a raffle to win your own MakerBot: Raffle Ticket for MakerBot Cupcake CNC

3D Printing Summit this weekend: learn about Makerbots and RepRaps!

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Last week, St. Louis Cardinals manager Tony La Russa sued Twitter over a fake account made in his name. La Russa had no case. Multiple lawyers chimed in, and I've yet to hear from any who thought he had even a remote chance to win this case. However, the AP reported that Twitter settled, deleted the account and agreed to donate an undisclosed sum to a La Russa-backed charity. This seemed like a really bad idea, because it would just encourage others who had fake accounts opened up to sue. Hell, if someone were really sneaky, they could get a friend to open up a fake account, and then go and sue Twitter to get some settlement money. Giving in to bullies with no legal basis can come back to haunt you.

But... Twitter is claiming the story is not true. It does say that it deleted the account, but that's because of the terms of service violation -- not because of any settlement. Instead:

Reports this week that Twitter has settled a law suit and officially agreed to pay legal fees for an impersonation complaint that was taken care of by our support staff in accordance with our Terms are erroneous. Twitter has not settled, nor do we plan to settle or pay.

With due respect to the man and his notable work, Mr. La Russa's lawsuit was an unnecessary waste of judicial resources bordering on frivolous. Twitter's Terms of Service are fair and we believe will be upheld in a court that will ultimately dismiss Mr. La Russa's lawsuit.

Now that is a lot more like it. In the meantime, it's worth noting that La Russa still doesn't seem to recognize the case still has no chance:

"There is a law against improperly using a person's name without authorization and it wasn't authorized."

I'm curious (a) which law he's talking about specifically and (b) how this was "improper use." The account was clearly a parody (and said so in the bio). There was no implied endorsement of anything or other misuse of La Russa's name. And, even if La Russa's statement was true, the liability would certainly be on whoever created the account -- not Twitter. While the details of what actually happened still aren't clear... I'm guessing that after Twitter deleted the accont, La Russa simply assumed they "settled." Most likely, his lawyers will drop the lawsuit, but it would be interesting to see if Twitter pushes to keep the lawsuit in place in order to try to get a favorable ruling and use it to prevent other, similar, frivolous lawsuits.

Oh, and in the meantime, isn't the Associated Press supposed to fact check things like "Tony La Russa and Twitter have reached a settlement in his lawsuit against the social networking site" and "Twitter has agreed to pay legal fees and make a donation to his Animal Rescue Foundation" both of which appear not to be true? The AP keeps telling us that only its "professional" journalists get things right -- whereas those "amateur" bloggers out there screw up the news all the time. Or did the AP figure that it could get away with not fact checking, since it could just threaten to sue any blogger who quoted its erroneous report?

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Peter from the Free Software Foundation sez, "The Free Software Foundation is looking for a new campaigns manager to work on its campaigns for computer user freedom, including the anti-DRM campaign DefectiveByDesign.org. We are looking for an energetic web activist with a track record in developing participatory campaigns and web sites. Based at the FSF offices in Boston, you will be working as part of a team to develop and carry out issue campaigns and build community resources. This is an opportunity to take a leadership role in the organization that sponsors the GNU project, publishes the GPL, and fights for computer user freedom."

Job opening on the FSF campaigns team (Thanks, Peter!)

Dave Hill blows minds with his groundbreaking Chihuahua-based trick at Seth Herzog's "Sweet" show at the Slipper Room in New York City. The magic starts around 1:40 in to the clip: Dave Hill Chihuahua Dance. You may also enjoy this video, in which he schools Venus Williams, Serena Williams, and Jelena Jankovic at the Dave Hill Tennis Academy.

Zrop writes "With a combination of GPS, Wi-FI-positioning, compass, and accelerometers, the iPhone is turbocharged for location-based services. Combine this with the new 3.0 iPhone OS and interesting things are certainly going to happen. Steve Jobs said that the iPhone will change the world when he presented it back in 2007, and that is exactly what it will do." The bulk of the article is about using the phone as a super real world pointer, which could be really cool if it could be accurate enough to be useful. Although not particularly ergonomic (are you pointing the screen at something? The camera? The headphone jack?)

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Zrop writes "With a combination of GPS, Wi-FI-positioning, compass, and accelerometers, the iPhone is turbocharged for location-based services. Combine this with the new 3.0 iPhone OS and interesting things is certainly going to happen. Steve Jobs said that the iPhone will change the world when he presented it back in 2007, and that is exactly what it will do." The bulk of the article is about using the phone as a super real world pointer, which could be really cool if it could be accurate enough to be useful. Although not particularly ergonomic (are you pointing the screen at something? The camera? The headphone jack?)

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Recently on Offworld, we wrapped up some of the final stragglers of E3 that went under-covered in the days before: primarily the first video of Microsoft's Natal-enabled virtual friend Milo, from Fable producer Peter Molyneux; the first true video of heartbreakingly gorgeous Shadow of the Colossus sequel The Last Guardian, the intergalactic void of WiiWare balance-puzzler You, Me and the Cubes; and Nintendo teasing the next Legend of Zelda for Wii. Indie developers got a good leg up as AdamAtomic -- creator of the recently covered indie game Fathom -- releases Flixel, his AS3 Flash libraries which vastly improve 2D game performance and include built in physics, spritesheet, sprite rotation, etc. support. We also found out why the silence surrounding long-anticipated indie iPhone puzzler Heroes & Villains, and saw Polytron's latest WIP peek at Fez. Finally, in celebration of 25 years of Tetris we watched the best documentary ever put together on the deep international political/business intrigue that rose up over Alexey Pajitnov's humble little game, listened to a fantastic cover of longtime Offworld favorite Magnetic Fields done all on Game Boy, saw BioShock's Andrew Ryan packing heat to putt, and, wonderfully, saw the first look at the Shadow of the Colossus DLC coming this week to LittleBigPlanet.

The latest Jay/Dave podcast, recorded last night at 7PM Pacific.

A little glimpse inside the news industry's mind: the recent recommendations of the American Press Institute. Charge for news, go after the aggregators, police fair use, look to consumers because the advertiser doesn't pay the bills anymore. A suicide pact, Dan Conover says.

The New York Times has a neighborhood blogging experiment, The Local. This week it extended an invitation to users: be the journalist. "Here is your first assignment: We're looking for someone to go to the 88th Precinct Community Council meeting next Wednesday, the 10th."

Three interlocking elements of a new system. The start of our kit for re-booting the news.

1. The pro-am invitation: help The Local cover Ft. Greene. Help us investigate.

2. Posted guidelines: how to cover a meeting for The Local; how to contribute to Chicago Now.

3. Assignment desk: an organized online list of everything we would cover if we had complete coverage of...

The launch and logic of inberkeley.com, a new local news blog that Dave and Lance Knobel have started. "It may not end up being the Berkeley blog. It may be the other thing that starts because people hate what we're doing."

The coral reef method of getting things done online. The Wikipedia stub. Their equivalent in news.

"Why wouldn't you want to be the newspaper of record...?" (Dave) vs. The Era of Omniscience is Over (Jay).

Sources of inspiration (Jay's turn this week.) Andrew Leonard's 1999 article in Salon, Open-source journalism. "This vision is alive."

Here's how Instructables user pilx made this simple floating dock with some wood carpentry and four 55 gallon plastic barrels.

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From the MAKE Flickr pool

Eschlaep shares details on building a 2-axis joystick from scavenged VCR and computer mouse parts -

Well, the other day I found another idler wheel from the same VCR, and I decided to share the construction technique so that you can make one too. It’s pretty simple and takes an hour or two. You will need a VCR idler wheel that looks like the one in the picture below, four microswitches (you can scavenge these from an old computer mouse), a spring, and a piece of sheet steel to mount the whole arrangement on. The sheet metal must be steel for reasons I will discuss later.

Fashioning compnents like these from scrap can be uniquely satisfying - and of course economical. Catch the full how-to over @ Tube Time.

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by Alastair Bland

This winter, my dad and I took up the project of building a simple pedal-powered cell phone charger to mount on my bicycle. Cell phones are small potatoes in the big picture of energy consumption, but the apparatus we built could be a very practical concept for those on self-supported bike tours or those living temporarily in situations without electricity. Just unplug your phone from the wall, and in the time that it takes for you to rig up this gizmo your phone will be out of juice and you'll be due for a long ride!

A couple visits to the local hardware store and Radio Shack secured all the parts we needed for the job.

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Just Posted: Our review of the Canon EOS 500D (Digital Rebel T1i in the United States and Kiss X3 Digital in Japan). Canon's xx0D series has for many years been one of the industry's most successful products. This latest incarnation comes with a (yet again) higher resolution sensor, a 920k pixel 3.0 inch LCD and 1080p HD video recording. Are these upgrades enough to defend one of the top spots in the 'entry level' segment of the market? Click through and find out in our review.

eldavojohn writes "You may be able to argue that a five thousand vote error is a small price to pay for a national election but these errors are certainly inadmissible on a much smaller scale. According to the Rapid City Journal a software glitch added 4,875 phantom ballots in a South Dakota election for a seat on the city council. It's not a hardware security problem this time, it's a software glitch. Althought not unheard of in electronic voting, this bug was about to cause a runoff vote since the incumbent did not hold a high enough percentage of the vote. That is no longer the case after the numbers were corrected. Wired notes it's probably a complex bug as it is not just multiplying the vote count by two. Here's to hoping that AutoMark follows suit and releases the source code for others to scrutinize."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

eldavojohn writes "You may be able to argue that a five thousand vote error is a small price to pay for a national election but these errors are certainly inadmissible on a much smaller scale. According to the Rapid City Journal a software glitch added 4,875 phantom ballots in a South Dakota election for a seat on the city council. It's not a hardware security problem this time, it's a software glitch. Althought not unheard of in electronic voting, this bug was about to cause a runoff vote since the incumbent did not hold a high enough percentage of the vote. That is no longer the case after the numbers were corrected. Wired notes it's probably a complex bug as it is not just multiplying the vote count by two. Here's to hoping that AutoMark follows suit and releases the source code for others to scrutinize."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Dorkbot SF is celebrating the org's seventh anniversary with a party at The Boiler Bar (2600 Magnolia @ 26th West Oakland, CA), 8:00pm - 2:00am, Saturday June 20, 2009.

Featuring:

Twin 15 Foot Tesla Coils just to light a lightbulb!
Golden Mean, Marriage Wrecker and Muffin Art Cars!
Tasty Food by Nick & Kiva
Beer by Lagunitas
Spark Bar hosted by Amy and Brian
Boiler Bar! Fire Gardens! LIVE ELECTROCUTIONS by the 1928 Hogan Device!

Complete information and presenter bios on host Jon Sarriugarte's 7 Year Dorkbot Anniversary Party blog post here.

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Over the years, we've found that every single industry "figure" or "study" on the harm done by unauthorized file sharing wasn't supported by anything factual once you started to dig into the details. So, when we saw yet another report claiming huge "costs" associated with file sharing in the UK we dismissed it pretty quickly noting it made many of the same mistakes as previous studies had. Apparently, it's even worse than that. Ben Goldacre, known for his excellent Bad Science blog has now taken the time to pick through the details of that awfully bad UK report, and found it laughable.

The big numbers being quoted, such as the £10 billion in losses? Not from any actual study. It's from an IP lawyer's press release, with nothing backing it up, other than "Rights owners have estimated" and that number includes both counterfeiting and "piracy" which are related, but different.

The other big figure quoted in the media? £120 billion worth of downloaded materials per year? Yeah, turns out that's based on (a) using a ridiculously high price of £25 per downloaded item and (b) totally and completely made up. You see, the number was already questionable, but the actual number in the report was not £120 billion, but £12 billion. Yet, the group blasting the report out to the press put the wrong numbers (just an order of magnitude off) in the press release, and only quietly changed it after one reporter caught the error. Goldacre asked the group what it was doing to alert the many, many reporters who went with the bogus number, and the group suddenly told him the interview was off the record.

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Brian F. O'Leary has posted slides updating his quantitative research on the effect of "piracy" and/or free giveaways on book-sales, done independently using data from O'Reilly and Random House (the largest tech publisher and general publisher in the world, respectively). The new slides, from the recent Book Expo America, expand the work with a larger data-set, and confirm the earlier findings that free downloads are broadly correlated with higher overall sales (though correlation is not causality!).

With a larger data set, we tried plotting the average paid sales of pirated and un-pirated content using a common starting point (that is, we plotted sales data week-by-week after publication). The results of the week-by-week and four-week rolling averages are shown on slides 28 and 29 of the BEA presentation. Both pirated and un-pirated titles showed similar growth in sales in the first few weeks after a title is published, followed by a decline after peak. Average sales for unpirated content start higher and peak later, although this may reflect the specific nature of titles in a small sample.

The primary difference between sales of pirated and unpirated content appeared in weeks 19 through 25, when sales for pirated content peaked a second time at a level higher than that seen in the first, sell-in period. This second peak followed the time (19 weeks) at which the average pirated O'Reilly front-list title was first seeded on a P2P site.

We stress that this is correlation, not causality, but the difference in the sales profile is notable and persists even when using rolling averages.

The impact of piracy

Impact of Piracy and Free on Book Sales (BEA 2009, Powerpoint) 2.0 MB

(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)

At the time that I was designing this Chair I had no knowledege of anyone else who was trying to shape living trees anywhere in the world. Knowing that if I had theliving chair idea, many others would have the same thought go through their mind. Some may have been able to act upon the idea, according to their life experiences and circumstances.

pooktre.com

Thanks to Carol and Emily for sending me the link.

Thorfinn.au writes "The New Scientist writes a conjectural piece to explain the light pattern of SCP 06F6 in what was first identified as a supernova but observation show a skewed and stretched light curve not fitting with an current theoretical explanation of exploding stars. Also the discussion in the comments is interesting."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Matt of NYCR shares his recipe for shooting a day's worth of time-lapse images and easily stringing them together as video -

So during the Thursday craft night we received a request from one of the hackerspace folks for some time lapse videos of the space over a 24 hour period. They are working on a project that will no doubt be stupendous and magnificent. However this spawned a quick project.

While we do have a camera or two that provide security / (is anyone there!?) data to members, and we were able to cobble together a fairly awesome sample of video for them. I had some time and the parts to quickly assemble something with higher over all image quality.

Check out the specifics available over on the NYCR blog.

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nk497 writes "Microsoft's newly revamped search tool Bing has already overtaken Yahoo in the US and globally, according to StatsCounter. The net traffic watcher said Bing has topped Yahoo 16.28% to 10.22% in the US, and 5.62% to 5.13% globally. Though the firm noted Bing's popularity may drop off after the excitement wears off, the firm also said: "Steve Ballmer is quoted as saying that he wanted Microsoft to become the second biggest search engine within five years. Following the breakdown in talks to acquire Yahoo at a cost of $40 billion it looks as if he may have just achieved that with Bing much sooner and a lot cheaper than anticipated." Google, of course, still leads by a considerable margin."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Back in February, we wrote about the saga of the video game Brutal Legend, which was being developed by game studio Double Fine, with an agreement for Vivendi Games to publish it. However, following Vivendi's merger with Activision, the new company had dropped plans to release the game, leading Double Fine to go in search of another publisher -- which it found in Activision's biggest rival, EA. Except... suddenly Activision claimed it still owned the rights to publish the game even though it had no intention to actually do so. Apparently nothing came of that discussion until now... just as EA has ramped up its promotion of Brutal Legend, Activision has sued. Back in February, EA's statement on the matter had been:

We doubt that Activision would try to sue. That would be like a husband abandoning his family and then suing after his wife meets a better looking guy.

Apparently, EA calculated incorrectly. In the end, this is a contractual dispute -- and the results will very much depend on the details of any agreement between Double Fine and Vivendi. However, it would be quite silly for Double Fine to have agreed to a deal with Vivendi that didn't allow for an out if Vivendi decided not to publish the game. Of course, it doesn't sound like Double Fine is taking this too seriously either. Its response to the lawsuit?

"Hey, if Activision liked it, they should have put a ring on it. Oh great, now Beyonce is going to sue me too."

They sure do like those marriage analogies.

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Erica "ALH84001" Archer provides some insight for those new to drawing up electronics schematics -

Most vintage schematics are hard to read because engineers back then customarily drew explicit connections for supply voltages all thru the schematic. But that can end up looking like a confusing maze of lines, making it hard to visualize what the circuit is doing.

Its a lot cleaner to just use supply symbols like the upwards arrow for V+, and the ground symbol wherever needed. Leave the explicitly drawn lines for voltages that are actually changing as the circuit does its job, and its easier to visualize whats going on. Now we're saving ink. The 1950's are over, baby!

There's quite a few quirks like this involved in the electronics design process - having them spelled out like this can be a big help to those new to the practice. Head over to Flickr for a bigger view and explanation.

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MAKE Contributing Editor Bill Gurstelle appears to be having a blast guest blogging on Boing Boing. I can't keep up with all of his post, he's so prolific. The first image above is from a post on a tree grown into a garden chair. I've always been fascinated by pleaching and other forms of shaping living trees. The other two pics are from a post on a mega potato cannon built by Christian Ristau, who built the absolutely stunning giant pneumatically-powered Hand of Man sculpture at Maker Faire.

Living Lounge Chair
The Mother of All Potato Cannons

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An anonymous reader writes "The Chinese government has sponsored the development of a censorware package called 'Green Dam Youth Escort'; basically a PC-resident IP blocker that gets regular updates of banned sites from a central government site. There are now plans afoot to mandate that all new PCs sold in China be shipped with this software. The rationale behind this is to 'stop the poisoning of children's minds.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Got a ThinkPad and have a tendency to trip over the power cord all the time? Envious of all those silver MacBooks with their stark minimalism and futuristic MagSafe power cables? Well, you're in luck. This Instructable will show you how to assemble your very own ThinkSafe magnetic power connector.

My Thinkpad's power connection started getting flaky, so I made a magnetic connector that works just like Apple's MagSafe connectors. It's effective, cool-looking, and breaks away cleanly when kicked. I used common materials that I had around or could find at my local hardware store, so you should be able to duplicate my efforts.

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In yet another sign that the entertainment industry's "winning" verdict in the trial of The Pirate Bay was anything but a victory, the surge in voters signed up to be a part of Sweden's Pirate Party was enough to elect two representatives of the party to the European Parliament, with 7.4% of the vote. And, of course, it's no surprise that this is a youth movement. Among voters under 30, 19% voted for The Pirate Party. Of course, you can guess how the entertainment industry will react -- shunning what they consider to be "immoral" "thieves" rather than recognizing what the party actually represents: those who believe in certain civil rights that are blocked and hindered by over-aggressive enforcement of intellectual property rules. I don't necessarily agree with the overall stance of "The Pirate Party" (and I hate the name), but it's hard to deny that it's actually making some inroads -- and that the entertainment industry isn't making much of an effort to understand why.

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Salim sez, "A treat for all copyfighters from U-Channel... a lecture by copyright lawyer Julie E. Cohen on how the law is evolving ten years after the DMCA. From the site"

In recent years, the law has been asked to respond to a variety of disputes involving accessibility of information and related technical standards and practices. These disputes cover the waterfront from the design of proprietary media players to network neutrality to privacy protection for search queries. So far, the law has been unable to generate compelling discourses and principles for evaluating them.

Prof. Cohen offers another way of thinking about issues of accessibility and unauthorized access. The reference point for this exercise is not be innovation, competition or expressive freedom, but rather the concept of "everyday practice," a term intended to encompass all of the ways in which situated users experience and interact with networked information technologies and the purposes for which they do so.

The Changing Meaning of `Unauthorized Access` MP3 Link

(Thanks, Salim!)

An anonymous reader writes "Netbooknews.com has scored a video of a 7-inch Google Android netbook from a company called GNB during Computex. The device is powered by a Freescale iMX31 CPU. The design might not be to everyone's taste, but it could turn out to be a super cheap Android netbook."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Makers is a beautiful hardbound book that introduces you to a brigade of citizen engineers making their own cameras, clocks, airplanes, submarines, musical instruments, weapons, medical equipment, energy- saving devices, robots, and houses. They create their own tools to explore the outer atmosphere, the deep sea, and the behavior of tiny flies in their backyard. It's a great peek into the lives of some really interesting people. It's also a great read after experiencing Maker Faire last weekend!

In the Maker Shed: Makers by Bob Parks

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There have been plenty of stories on the inner workings of China's "Great Firewall," whereby various ISPs are threatened with liability if they don't block "bad stuff." Yet, it's all been done at the ISP level. Apparently, that's about to change. A report is making the rounds that, as of July 1st, all PCs sold in China will be required to have client-side censorship software. You have to wonder if the censorship software also includes spying software.... Either way, you have to imagine it won't take long at all for people to figure out how to disable such software.

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eldavojohn writes "The Ethics Organization of Computer Software (EOCE), now 233 companies strong, and met in Tokyo yesterday to ban a controversial title from Japan known as RapeLay, an eroge game (something much more adult than the more popular dating simulators). It's gotten a lot of press as reviewers have noted at one point the player must force sex on a 12-year-old. More importantly, the large ($353 million annually) adult game industry in Japan will now need to stay away from rape in their games if they wish to remain a member of EOCS. RapeLay seems to be available on Amazon's UK and JP sites, sparking outrage and causing a former US Ambassador to Japan to write an editorial criticizing Japan, saying, 'Only Japan allows people to possess these hideous images without penalty. Six of the G-7 countries have found ways to protect the innocent from being prosecuted for possession of child pornography. Is it not time for Japan to find a way to punish the guilty?' Singapore's Straits Times has more details, pointing out that it's still not illegal to possess these materials in Japan. We discussed this and other games last month in an editorial."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Viktor from the excellent Tank Riot podcast sez, "The Happy mutants at Tank Riot dedicated a show to the one and only Emma Goldman. The team discusses the intriguing life of the controversial 'Red Emma', an anarchist, free-speech advocate, social activist, and spokesperson for women's freedom and birth control rights. We look at her connections to the Haymarket Affair, the Russian and Spanish Revolutions, Alexander Berkman and the publication of 'Mother Earth', Johann Most and her involvement in fighting for worker's rights. We suggest it because we want people to hear a little about someone who vanished from history books for demanding change in the world."

I just saw this in my podcatcher and can't wait to listen to it -- these guys always do a great job on their subjects, and this is a fine subject indeed.

Emma Goldman: Tank Riot (Thanks, Viktor!)

(Image: Emma Goldman on a street car, 1917, a Creative Commons Attribution photo from bobster855's Flickr stream)

Here's a set of instructions for operating and maintaining the replica of Charles Babbage's mechanical computer -- the storied difference engine -- built and displayed in 1991 at London's Science Museum to commemorate the bicentenary of the birth of Charles Babbage.

If the Engine is being demonstrated on a daily basis, lt should be oiled and greased at least once a week. If no demonstrations are taking place, then the Engine should be oiled and greased on a monthly basis, but the handle should be turned at least twice a week to cycle the mechanisms.

Grease : "Alvania" grease or it's equivalent should be used.

Grease

1. all vertical motion cam profiles only and their levers.
2. all bevel gears above and below the cam stack.
3. all bevel gears on the carry axes and those on the carry drive shaft.
4. the phasing gear, register pinion, "Impact tooth and the tw-in tooth drive.
5. the pawl wheel and crank pinion.

INSTRUCTION MANUAL to Operate and Maintain Charles Babbage's 2nd Difference Engine (via Hack the Planet)

(Image: The Difference Engine, a Creative Commons Attribution photo from Adactio's Flickr stream)

Rogue archivist Carl Malamud sez,

You may remember the FedFlix program from Public.Resource.Org. We got the National Technical Information Service (NTIS), a part of the U.S. Department of Commerce, to send a couple dozen videotapes every month. We digitized the tapes, and sent them back to the government with a DVD. No cost to .gov, and we got public domain data to post as high-res stock footage, plus great casual viewing on YouTube and the Internet Archive. The program went well for a year, the DC folks were happy, and I'm pleased to say we were able to renew the Joint Venture, but with a twist. They're now sending a minimum of 100 tapes a month and we have rights to all 6,000 masters in their warehouse.

The first batch of video arrived and the Public.Resource.Org Factory has been going full-tilt. We've put out an average of 11.5 hours of new video every day for the last 11 days, including some amazing previously unseen-on-the-Internet flicks featuring James Cagney, a bunch of Disney stuff, historical films by John Ford, and an amazingly clueless judicial film on "Special Needs Offender: Cyber Criminals." We put all our video in 3 places (some copies still updating or sorting):

1. YouTube (link)

2. Internet Archive (link)

3. bulk.resource.org, available for FTP and rsync as well as http. (link)

Did I mention this whole thing was no cost to the government? And, no cost to anybody ... this is an unfunded project and we did it for about $350 in hardware costs.

My only question is why the government isn't cranking out 11.5 hours of new video per day. Enjoy.

YouTube - PublicResourceOrg's Channel (Thanks, Carl!)

Nick sends us Brain Chef, "A fun addictive browser game. Simple to play, choose to be a human or a zombie and move around the map hunting other online players. Humans want to kill zombies. Zombies want to kill humans. Everyone wants to kill SecuROM."

Brain Chef: Fight zombies, gameshow hosts, and copyright abuse. Fight other online players too! (Thanks, Nick!)

As of July 1, PCs sold in China will come with mandatory on-disk censorware that will prevent users from looking at web-pages that displease the party. How much do you want to bet that this is proposed (in the name of protecting children) in at least one western country within 12 months? I'm guessing Australia -- they've got some techno-ignorant parliamentarians down who're so eager to censor the Internet it'd curl your hair.

The government, which has told global PC makers of the requirement but has yet to announce it to the public, says the effort is aimed at protecting young people from "harmful" content. The primary target is pornography, says the main developer of the software, a company that has ties to China's security ministry and military.

China Squeezes PC Makers (Thanks, Patrick!)

The Pirate Party, a Swedish copyright reform party that was inspired by The Pirate Bay, has won two seats in the European Parliamentary election. The party attributes its success in part to the scandal surrounding the trial of The Pirate Bay's operators, which was conducted by a judge who failed to disclose that he was a prominent member of a copyright-industry-friendly copyright-expansion association.

This should be interesting.

When we asked Pirate Party leader Rick Falkvinge about the outcome, he told TorrentFreak: "We've felt the wind blow in our sails. We've seen the polls prior to the election. But to stand here, today, and see the figures coming up on that screen... What do you want me to say? I'll say anything"

"Together, we have today changed the landscape of European politics. No matter how this night ends, we have changed it," Falkvinge said. "This feels wonderful. The citizens have understood it's time to make a difference. The older politicians have taken apart young peoples' lifestyle, bit by bit. We do not accept that the authorities' mass-surveillance," he added.

Pirate Party Wins and Enters The European Parliament (Thanks, Benno!)

Ray Wilson of MusicFromOuterSpace gives a very in-depth review of the new Sound Lab Ultimate's features (skip to the 7min mark for sound samples). The Ultimate is an expanded sequel to the popular Sound Lab analog synth project, which adds a bunch of new features and makes the project fully patchable -

• Three Musically Accurate VCOs (sawtooth and variable width rectangular wave forms, pulse width modulation, hard-sync, log and linear CV inputs)
  
• VCOs provide plenty of tracking range. Listen to the samples below.
  
• White Noise Generator
  
• Active Mixer (for VCOs, noise and external input)
  
• Voltage Controlled LP Filter (12db/Oct doubles as a sine wave oscillator)
  
• Voltage Controlled Amplifier (log response)
  
• Attack Release Envelope Generator
  
• Two Low Frequency Oscillators (square, ramp, tri and sawtooth waveforms)
  
• Repeat Gate Generator (doubles as another square wave LFO)
  
• Sample & Hold (with variable sample rate and glide)
  
• Attenuator Bank (for an infinite variety of modulation patches)
  
• Patch Panel Design (provides infinitely variable combinations of sounds)
  
• Professionally machined panels and PC Boards available from MFOS
  
• Sound Lab ULTIMATE "Expander" already on the drawing board.

Looks like an awesome project for advanced synth DIYers out there. PCB + panel kits are available from the MFOS site.

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New Scientist has an interesting piece up about the calculable energy costs per mile for various forms of transportation. Despite the headline ("Train can be worse for climate than plane"), the study it describes deals with highway-based vehicles, too: the authors attempted to integrate not just the cost at the tailpipe (or equivalent) for each mode of transport, but also the costs of developing and supporting the associated infrastructure, such as rails, highways and airports. Such comparisons are tricky, though; a few years back, a widely circulated report claimed that the Toyota Prius had a higher per-mile lifetime cost than the Hummer (see that earlier Slashdot post for good reason to be skeptical of the methodology and conclusions). I wonder how the present comparison would be affected by a calculation of (for instance) how much it would cost to move by plane the freight currently carried by trains.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

(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)

At the time that I was designing this Chair I had no knowledege of anyone else who was trying to shape living trees anywhere in the world. Knowing that if I had theliving chair idea, many others would have the same thought go through their mind. Some may have been able to act upon the idea, according to their life experiences and circumstances.

http://www.pooktre.com /garden_chair.htm

Thanks to Carol and Emily for sending me the link.

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

Everybody's talking about the honorable Marilyn Milian, the hottest judge on television!
--Opening tagline for the television show "The People's Court"

I've been watching a lot of TV judge shows lately, mainly because I don't have cable, they're on when I'm working on Make Magazine projects in my workshop, they're good background noise, and hey, they're marginally better than Maury Povich or Deal or No Deal.

I'm no connoisseur of small claims court television, but I do have opinions. I kind of like Judge Joe Brown, because he frequently does weird things with his voice. He'll be lecturing someone for trashing their roommates CD collection when mid-sentence, he switches to a deep, over-the-top, musical baritone for no reason at all. Sort of like Steve Bochco's Cop Rock show.

Judge "Christina's Court" Perez's tag line is that she "takes law into her own heart." I have absolutely no earthly idea what that means.

Anyway, if what daytime TV viewers are seeking is hot, sexy justice, then it's time for a new concept altogether. Maybe a show where the judge wears a tight fitting black leather robe and carries a riding crop? At the end, the loser has to strip down to their underwear and the winner gets to yell stuff at them. Now that's hot. Copyright 2009. Feel free to call my hot, sexy agent with offers.

As Radley Balko says, there's got to be great story behind this photo.

UPDATE: Steven Leckart says It's a sculpture called "Ancient Echo"!

Man comforts young, semi-clothed, vomiting orangutan

The iFixit fellas waited in line all night at the Sprint store to snag a new Palm Pre so they could reduce it down to its constituent parts. They're geek like 'at.

Then, PhoneWreck took over and did a thorough analysis of the Pre's innards.

See their component diagram at the end of the teardown.

PhoneWreck's observations:

There are some pretty interesting things that popped up on the Pre's PCB's. This is the first production device we've seen on the OMAP3 (Open Media Applications Processor) platform. OMAP3 is powered by the 600MHZ ARM Cortex A8, PowerVR SGX 530 (GPU), 430MHz C64x, DSP and ISP (Image Signal Processor) and was clearly designed to pack a punch - Dr. Wreck thinks we're going to see this processor popping up in future netbook endeavours.

On the connections side we see the usual wifi/bluetooth combo going to Marvell and CSR with the W8686 and 63823 respectively. We also see the BaseBand win going to Qualcomm with the heavily integrated MSM6801A platform. The OMAP3 PMIC comes loaded with a USB tranceiver and Audio codec which even further reduces the overall board density of this device. We're not fully sure - but it looks as if the Pre's cool new multi-touch Touch Screen Controller win went to Cypress Semiconductor with the CP6944BA device.

PhoneWreck's full analysis is online here.

Palm Pre Teardown

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