(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)

Back in 1960, U.S. Army Captain Bertrand Brinley published the Rocket Manual for Amateurs, one of the greatest DIY books ever written. Its cover price reads 75 cents. Buying a copy today in a used bookstore could set you back more than $100. But it's that good. (I know, I have it.)

There is a considerable amount of information on rocket motor making in RMFA. The line drawings are excellent and the writing clear and straightforward. A lot of people bought this book back in the 50s and 60s, because making rocket motors was a fashionable pastime, and there were lots of clubs and societies that would tinker around making rocket engines.

But like any high energy hobby, things could and would go wrong and people got hurt. Rocket engines had a nasty habit of blowing up in the maker's face and causing injury. There is a part of the process where the propellant is rammed into a tube and that's pretty dangerous. (I personally know of a couple people who hurt themselves this way.) So, the activity changed, and rocket people were encouraged to buy commercial rocket motors instead of rolling their own.

That is indeed much safer. But I think you lose something when you give up the core part of the activity. That's why in Absinthe and Flamethrowers I provide instructions for creating a small but powerful rocket motor wholly out of stuff available at Home Depot or SuperTarget. There's just something so ... satisfying about homebrewing a rocket with stuff you got at Walmart.

Brinley's book contains instructions for making for "micrograin" rocket engines (pulverized zinc and sulfur ramrodded into a steel container.) I tried it and it burns like crazy. Whoa nelly, that's some hot stuff. Probably too dangerous for an amateur.

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "In Capitol Records v. Thomas-Rasset, the judge has denied the defendant's motion to suppress the MediaSentry evidence for illegality, holding that MediaSentry's conduct did not violate any of the three laws cited by the defendant. The judge also dismissed most of the RIAA's objections to testimony by the defendant's expert, Prof. Yongdae Kim, but did sustain some of them. In his 27-page decision (PDF), Judge Davis ruled that Prof. Kim could testify about the 'possible scenarios,' but could not opine as to what he thinks 'probably' occurred. The court also ruled that, 'given the evidence that there is no wireless router involved in this case, the Court excludes Kim's opinion that it is possible that someone could have spoofed or hijacked Defendant's Internet account through an unprotected wireless access point. Similarly, because Kim explicitly testified that this case does not involve any "black IP space," or any "temporarily unused" IP space ...., he is not permitted to opine at trial that hijacking of black IP space or temporary unused IP is a possible explanation in this case.' Dr. Kim was also precluded from testifying as to whether song files were conspicuously placed in a shared files folder or were wilfully offered for distribution. The judge also precluded him from testifying about Kazaa's functioning, but it was unclear to me what the judge was precluding him from saying, because the offered testimony seemed to relate only to the question of whether the Kazaa-reported IP address precluded the possibility of the device having been run behind a NAT device."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Reader Kyle Brady writes in to tell us his own story about how he fought back against one of his Computer Science professors, who threatened to fail him because he posted the code he wrote online. Kyle is a CS student, and only posted the code after the assignments were due (so it wasn't helping other students). He did so because he figured it might help him find a job to show examples of his coding skills and also because he believes in the value of sharing code. But his professor claimed that it was a violation of school policies, potentially "cheating" and that he could fail Kyle. Kyle responded by going through the school's Academic Integrity Policy, and not finding anything that he violated. When the professor did not agree with Kyle's response (to put it mildly), Kyle contacted the CS department head and explained his position. The department head researched the situation and finally agreed with Kyle that there was no violation of academic policy -- and, more importantly, that professors could not bar students from posting their code online or penalize students from doing so.

I have to admit that I'm rather surprised that a separate issue did not come up. That is, many schools make students sign something saying that any code they create as a student has the copyright automatically assigned to the school. This has resulted in conflicts, as students are surprised to learn that they can't do anything with the code they created as students. I don't know if SJSU does this or not, but you could see a school claiming that since it holds the copyright on such code, that it could prevent students from posting the content. Luckily, that does not appear to be the case in this situation.

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I came across this very elegant residential energy efficiency dashboard from Agilewaves as I was thinking about user interfaces for my smart home project. I like the clean, intuitive design and the logical layout. Skilled interface designers were probably involved with creating this interface. I won't pretend to be a skilled interface designer, and I do want to create a simple user interface that communicates historic resource usage and current usage measurements. There are a lot of tools available to create complex user interfaces with back-end stub code to simplify programming. Much of my programming experience involves embedded systems, and I prefer hacking systems that hide inside larger electromechanical devices, with an embedded controller to handle measurement and control with specifically defined user interaction. Thus, AJAX and PERL are not the first tools I grab to create an interface. I do have pushbuttons, 4 bit to 32 bit microcontrollers, and LCD displays at the ready in my tool kit. With those tools in mind, I've set about creating a basic look and feel for my dashboard.

In my previous posts, I outlined some of the general requirements for a smart home network that aggregates energy generation and usage data for a net-zero building. I have looked at basic measurement and control needs of the building's users, and the sources of signals and the sensors needed to acquire those signals. I want to display this information to the users and occupants of the building. As a place to start, I've drawn some basic widgets that will be fed data for display.

Continue on to the SPARK Project blog to see more.

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redsoxh8r writes "Security researcher Robert Hansen, known as Rsnake, has developed a new class of attack that abuses a weakness in many corporate intranets and most browsers to compromise remote machines with persistent JavaScript backdoors. Threatpost reports: "The attacks rely on the long-term caching policies of some browsers and take advantage of the collisions that can occur when two different networks use the same non-routable IP address space, which happens fairly often because the amount of address space is quite small. The bottom line is that even a moderately skilled attacker has the ability to compromise remote machines without the use of any vulnerability or weakness in the client software.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

darthcamaro writes "A decade after work first began on version 9 of BIND, the widely deployed open source DNS (define) server, work is now fully underway on its successor, BIND 10. '"One of the goals for BIND 10 is to allow people to customize and extend without too much trouble," Shane Kerr, BIND 10's program manager at the Internet Systems Consortium (ISC), told InternetNews.com.' Sounds good right? Only problem is that it's going to take a bit of time until BIND 10 is actually ready for production — potentially as long as five years!"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Benthic microbial fuel cell" is propeller-head code for the following very interesting fact: If you bury a metal plate a few centimeters beneath the ocean floor, and elevate a parallel plate a few centimeters above the ocean floor, the potential between them (due to ongoing microbial metabolism in the sediment) is enough to generate useful power. 800mV is a typical figure, but if I understand correctly, the current is directly related to the area of the plates, so the amount of power available by this method is theoretically only limited by the size of the plates you can install. Mark Nielsen is a doctoral candidate at Oregon State University under Dr. Clare Reimers, an expert in the field. This page at the OSU website provides a nice general overview of the concept and of Mark's work in particular.

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There are times when I think that intellectual property disputes are actually just "theater of the absurd." The latest such entry involves Europe's High Court needing to weigh in on the trademark-ability of a chocolate bunny. The WSJ writeup on this is rather amusing, including all sorts of little rabbit-related turns of phrase ("little critters have since multiplied" and "hopping mad") as it appears the writer knows how absurd the whole situation is. Amazingly there have been a whole bunch of lawsuits over whether or not such a bunny shape is trademarkable. The company that holds the trademark, Lindt, claims its shape is distinctive, and thus can be covered by trademark. Other chocolate bunnymakers, however, respond that the shape is functional, not decorative, because there are really only so many ways to make a chocolate bunny such that it does not collapse.

It may be surprising to learn that, in this age of automated vehicle assembly and supersonic flight, crafting a hollow, mass-produced chocolate bunny is no mean feat. There are considerations of structural integrity, and the performance capabilities of high-speed foil-wrapping devices....

In court in Austria, Hauswirth called to the stand witnesses from the makers of chocolate-casting machines and foil-wrapping machines.

They testified, said Mr. Schmidt, that "there are certain limits" to the "radius of the ears and so on." You can't just make a bunny any old way you wish.

Of course, as other chocolate bunny makers have also noted, making chocolate bunnies of a similar size and shape has happened for many, many years in Europe -- long before Lindt claimed a trademark on the shape earlier this decade. And, so, for the past decade, there have been numerous lawsuits (with all different kinds of decisions) over the legality of trademarking chocolate bunnies -- eventually reaching Europe's high court today. At issue was whether or not Lindt's decision to trademark the shape was done in "bad faith" and the court has now sent the case back to an Austrian court, saying that they should consider a variety of factors in determining whether or not the initial trademark registration was done in bad faith.

So, rest assured, we still have a few more absurdist acts as we find out whether or not chocolate bunnies are truly trademarkable.

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An anonymous reader writes with an excerpt from Neowin.net "Sarah Sharp, a self-styled 'geekess' and Linux developer at Intel's Open Source Technology Center who has recently been working on the Linux USB subsystem, announced on her blog that support of USB 3.0 will soon be integrated into the Linux kernel. This makes Linux the first operating system to support the standard. If you can't wait and have the expertise necessary, she includes instructions on how to get USB 3.0 support in Linux now." Here's Sharp's post.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Dave sez, "Just a quick note to say that the Science Scout website has been completely revamped and ready to take in your anecdotes for why you deserve certain badges (Also a bunch of newish badges are now on display, including, The 'I'm a marine biologist but I kind of f***ing hate dolphins' badge). As well, we're talking to nerdmeritbadges about potentially supplying real badges. Maybe the badges with the most comments will get chosen?"

Badges! Badges! Badges! (Thanks, Dave!)

jimmi_hendrix writes was one of several people to note CNET's report that 'Microsoft plans to remove Internet Explorer from the versions of Windows 7 that it ships in Europe, CNET News has learned. Reacting to antitrust concerns expressed by European regulators, Microsoft plans to offer a version in Europe that has the browser removed. Computer makers would then have the option to add the browser back in, ship another browser or ship multiple browsers, according to a confidential memo that was sent to PC makers and seen by CNET News." There's also a report at Ars Technica.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A group of people in the UK have been arrested after they allegedly put their own music on the iTunes Music Store and Amazon, then purchased it with stolen credit-card numbers. Police say they made 19 tracks and put them up in the shops, then spent about $750,000 on the music, grabbing about $330,000 in royalties from the purchases. It's quite the scam, since one difficulty in stealing credit-card numbers is converting them into cash. One way to do this is to sell the numbers themselves; another common way for people to do this is to take a stolen card, then go buy gift cards from a store with it, then sell the cards on the street at a discount. But selling Wal-Mart gift cards and hawking them on the street seems like an awful lot of work, compared to what a criminal with a computer and some music software can do. Of course, it's not too smart to continually buy the same tracks over and over with 1,500 stolen cards...

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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s31523 writes "In Februrary lawmakers postponed the switch from analog to digital TV. Now, the new June 12th deadline is upon us with no sign of another delay. CNET is reporting that the President himself has stated, '... I want to be clear: there will not be another delay.' So it looks like it is going to happen, for real this time. Even with the delay, there are still millions of estimated viewers that are unprepared. Local stations may participate in the voluntary 'Analog nightlight' services in which TV stations agree to keep an analog signal turned on in addition to their digital signals to provide information about the DTV transition and to notify unprepared TV viewers of emergencies, such as hurricanes."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Instructables user brokengun wrties:

This instructable documents the process of my single rotor wind turbine. It is built with inspiration from Hugh Piggot and the folks at Otherpower.com. This is my first attempt at building a wind turbine, and I will try to include the mistakes I've made along the way so that other first-time builders can avoid them! Since this entire project has a budget of just about $1000, it is meant to be able to be completed by both newcomers to wind energy as well as those who don't have a lot of money to throw around. I also tried to use as much recycled material as possible, so a large portion of this turbine is made from a junked car and metal that was going to be thrown out by fabricators.

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From time to time I get requests from developers who want to modify RSS so it can do something that wasn't forseen when the spec was frozen in 2002. Here's what I wrote to a developer who asked about that today (the specifics are xxx'd out).

Hi xxx -- I think it's a great idea to integrate xxx and RSS.

However.. I don't know enough about xxx to understand the substance of what you want to do.

You can add all the information you want to a feed by defining a namespace or by creating a new format called something other than RSS that shares its properties and adds anything you want, or for that matter, changes anything you want.

RSS 2.0 has been frozen since 2002, and that's absolute. It was necessary to do that to keep it from becoming a moving target. Lots of people had ideas for adapting RSS to their own projects, and that's supported through the two mechanisms I outlined above.

Dave

The near total arbitrariness of Apple's iPhone morality police continues... We've already noted how odd it is that certain apps got rejected -- such as an eBook reader that users might, possibly be able to read the Kama Sutra with, because it provided access to the public domain library at Project Gutenberg. Never mind the fact that the same content could be accessed easily via a browser -- such as the included Safari browser on the iPhone. However, other apps seem to get through with no problem. Dave Title notes that Apple apparently had no problem with a Suicide Girls' app that allowed users to "strip" women down to their underwear simply by flipping the phone. It's a silly meaningless app (and doesn't contain any actual nudity), but it does make you wonder. Why is one app potentially harmful according to Apple's morality police, while the other is perfectly fine?

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Cable operators -- representatives of the industry that has spent the last several years arguing that they should be able to charge net-video providers for the right to send data to their customers -- are now arguing that video companies should not be allowed to charge them for the right to send video to their customers.

"Media giants are in the early stages of becoming Internet gatekeepers by requiring broadband providers to pay for their Web-based content and services and include them as part of basic Internet access for all subscribers," an ACA press release on the issue warns. "These content providers are also preventing subscribers who are interested in the content from independently accessing it on broadband networks of providers that have refused to pay."

Cable group turns net neutrality around over ISP access fees

david_a_eaves writes "The Chinese government is mandating that all computers sold in China come with Internet blocking software. Rob Cottingham writes an excellent piece noting how the censorship application of this software should be the least of our concerns. This new software may create an opportunity for the Chinese Government to appropriate these computers and use them to create the worlds largest botnet army."

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)

Magnetism Studios is offering a selection of droll, stylish interactive forms, useful for a wide variety of everyday situations (apologies, invitations, unsolicited feedback, airing of grievances, etc.)

From the www.BureauOfCommunications.com website:

"Every day there are millions of thoughts that go unspoken. To promote better understanding between the peoples of the world, the Bureau of Communication is pleased to present a selection of fill-in-the-blank stationery for everyday correspondence....

(Image courtesy of Kevin Dunn, whose book Caveman Chemistry, along with bunch of other cool hands-on projects, contains a chapter on knapping in bottle glass. Thanks Kevin!)

Anybody else read Snow Crash? Remember the big scary Aleut who likes to steal warheads from nuclear submarines using only his canoe and handmade glass knife? Remember how, when you first read that book, you kinda wanted to be that guy? Well, I'm here telling you: It's not too late to become the baddest mango-farmer in the world. After all, even Raven had to start somewhere, and apparently chipping an arrowhead out of bottle glass is the "hello world" of the flintknapping user community. Mike Melbourne and Tim Rast's venerable tutorial shows you how.

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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. Twitter: @wmgurst)

Back when I was a boy scout, you had to learn either semaphore or Morse code to earn First Class Scout rank. Most kids in my troop learned semaphore because it was easier to learn. I'm proud to say I learned Morse code. I still remember the code for "a," "e," "I" "n" "o" "s" and "t." So, if the chips were down, I could tap out "I eat no oats," or "Note, I see stones."

The first ship to transmit an SOS distress call was the Cunard liner Slavonia on June 10, 1909, when it went aground on rocks off the Azores.

Prior to that, ships used a variety of distress calls, such as:

-.-. -.. --.- CDQ (subject to misunderstanding)

..- .... / --- .... / .-- . / .- .-. . / ... .. -. -.- .. -. --. UH OH WE ARE SINKING (much clearer)

.. / - .... .. -. -.- / .. / .... .. - / .- / --. --- -.. -.. .- -- -. / .. -.-. . -... . .-. --. I THINK I HIT A GODDAMN ICEBERG (No doubt at all here)

... .... .. .--. / -.-. .- .--. - .- .. -. / -....- / ..-. .- .. .-.. SHIP CAPTAIN - FAIL!

A while back, Jay Leno gave identical messages to the "world's fastest texter" and an old time Morse code expert and set a contest to see who could send it faster. The Morse code blew the texter away. Sort of like John Henry beating the steam drill. Video is here.

.. / .-- .- -. - / - --- / -.. .. . / .--. . .- -.-. . ..-. ..- .-.. .-.. -.-- / .. -. / -- -.-- / ... .-.. . . .--. --..-- / .-.. .. -.- . / -- -.-- / --. .-. .- -. -.. ..-. .- - .... . .-. .-.-.- .-.-.- / -. --- - / ... -.-. .-. . .- -- .. -. --. / .- -. -.. / -.-- . .-.. .-.. .. -. --. / .-.. .. -.- . / - .... . / .--. .- ... ... . -. --. . .-. ... / .. -. / .... .. ... / -.-. .- .-. .-.-.-

eldavojohn writes "Republican Senator Orrin Hatch spoke Tuesday at the World Copyright Summit in Washington DC and hailed the Pirate Bay guilty verdict as an important victory. He expressed severe disappointment in Canada for showing up on our watch list for piracy next to China and Russia. Senator Hatch also said, 'In fact, one study reports that each year, copyright piracy from motion pictures, sound recordings, business and entertainment software, and video games costs the US economy $58 billion in total output, costs American workers 373,375 jobs and $16.3 billion in earnings, and costs federal, state, and local governments $2.6 billion in tax revenue. During this time of economic turmoil, we must ensure that all copyrighted works, both here and abroad, are protected from online theft and traditional physical piracy. After all, US copyright-based industries continue to be one of America's largest and fastest-growing economic sectors.' GamePolitics notes that for his 2006 campaign, Hatch was rented for $7,000 by the RIAA and also got on his knees for $12,640 from the MPAA."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

At one minute past midnight Eastern Time this Saturday, Facebook users will be permitted to claim a unique user name, which may well spark a virtual vanity landgrab the likes of which we've never seen. Author and former BB guestblogger Douglas Rushkoff says this is the moment when Facebook becomes obsolete.

This is more than 200 million users, already engaged, simultaneously scrambling in the greatest territory dash since the Oklahoma Territory's land run of 1889, albeit with fewer shotgun injuries.

But Facebook's new page-naming scheme actually brings up other memories for me, ones that hold bigger stakes for the company itself. It reminds me of the moment that AOL, formerly a completely closed network with its own content, allowed its users onto the greater Internet for the first time. Internet USENET boards were filled with what we called "newbies" wandering around and asking anyone they could find how to download pornography. Formerly high-level conversations were quickly brought down to the lowest common denominator as a huge population of people uninitiated in basic Internet etiquette flooded the networks faster than we could educate them.

The impact was far worse for AOL. By opening itself to the greater Internet, AOL revealed itself as something of a wading pool. A mini-Internet. Once people could use AOL as a portal to the true, unadulterated, global net, the company was reduced to an ISP. AOL became series of phone numbers you dial to get online, and little more. Steve Case knew his moment was over, and used his inflated stock price to purchase some real assets like Time Warner. We all know how that turned out.

The Facebook Land Grab (Daily Beast)

coondoggie writes "In this its 40th year of operating system life, some Unix stalwarts are trying to resurrect its past. That is, they are taking on the unenviable and difficult job of restoring to their former glory old Unix software artifacts such as early Unix kernels, compilers and other important historical source code pieces. In a paper to be presented at next week's Usenix show, Warren Toomey of the Bond School of IT is expected to detail restoration work being done on four key Unix software artifacts all from the early 1970s — Nsys, 1st edition Unix kernel, 1st and 2nd edition binaries and early C compilers. In his paper, Toomey states that while the history of Unix has been well-documented, there was a time when the actual artifacts of early Unix development were in danger of being lost forever."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This one's a bit old, but I finally got around to reading Joe Mullin's fascinating, but troubling, account which pits a Stanford professor and doctor against a French company, Advanced Biological Laboratories, that claims to own patents on (effectively) using computer data to help doctors make diagnostic decisions. If you want to see the specific patents, they are 6,188,988 and 6,081,786. At issue, is the fact that Dr. Bob Shafer has been working for years (actually, since before either patent was filed) on putting together HIVdb, an exceptionally useful database on HIV details that many researchers rely on to help figure out potential treatments to HIV. Except... of course, ABL claims that it infringes on those patents.

Since Dr. Shafer works for Stanford, ABL threatened Stanford, who brought in some lawyers who pointed out that the patents had very little chance of surviving any sort of review -- but Stanford, apparently anxious to avoid a long, drawn-out or costly lawsuit, agreed to settle the dispute, promising to put a warning note on HIVdb that using the system for commercial purposes might require a license from ABL. Shafer, who didn't know such a settlement was in the works, was quite upset to find out about it -- and refused to put the warning message on the site (eventually he put an edited version, hidden deep within the site, including his own opinion about how silly it was).

Shafer also has hired his own lawyer and is pushing forward to invalidate ABL's patents. He's also been learning more and more about how such patents are all too often used against their stated purpose, and how, rather than encouraging innovation, they're being used to stifle it and (more importantly) to put lives at risk. Shafer and his colleagues are reasonably horrified that Stanford gave in, noting that it only encourages such behavior, and enables ABL and others to pull the same sort of stunt against others.

Given that Shafer refused to live up to the terms of the deal that he had never agreed to in the first place, ABL moved forward and sued Shafer directly, and that case is now ongoing -- even as Shafer hopes to invalidate the patent through the Patent Office itself. The whole thing is yet another story of how patents are being used to stifle innovation -- and sometimes put lives at risk. It's tragic that we've been seeing so many such stories lately.

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Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories has a stellar article introducing you to serial communication with AVR microcontrollers. If you have a basic knowledge or Arduino and want to take it further, this is for you.

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• Rob reviewed the Kindle DX. It's great, but...

• We also ran a gallery of the Kindle DX compared with 10 everyday things (Box, Helmet, Puppy...) to give an idea of why its bigger size isn't at all troublesome.

• Xeni spotted a cleverly designed umbrella that allows one to avoid poking other pedestrians, or from having to make eye contact with Ben Stein.

• There's a charming stop-motion demo for an iPhone app.

• Monster made a remote control, but it looks like it should be something else.

• The Xperia X2's keyboard looks like typing may be possible on it. Typing.

• Behold! Homeplug.

• They finished building that massive Gundam statue.

• What is real?

juggledean writes "The World Health Organization (WHO) has declared a global flu pandemic after holding an emergency meeting, according to reports. It means the swine flu virus is spreading in at least two regions of the world with rising cases being seen in the UK, Australia, Japan and Chile." Whether it's called a pandemic or not, there's a hopeful note in the story about H1N1's spread: "...there were people who believed we might be in a kind of apocalyptic situation and what we're really seeing now with H1N1 is that in most cases the disease is self-limiting."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Perhaps no video gaming company has had more trouble with the gaming community when it comes to things like DRM than EA. The company received tons of negative publicity for its aggressive and annoying DRM found in the release of Spore (which did little to nothing in actually slowing the unauthorized spread of the game). More recently, the company went with a much less troubling DRM solution on its latest version of The Sims (though, despite its attempt to call it something other than DRM, it is still DRM -- and, I should note, we've received a bunch of submissions from people who have found the DRM to be cumbersome).

However, the biggest change may be (possibly?) in the attitude of execs at the company -- who at least appear to be trying to become more accepting of the fact that some people will always download and/or share unauthorized versions of games. In an interview with Kotaku (thanks William for sending this in), the CEO of EA tries to put a positive spin on things:

And speaking of pirates, no matter what EA charges for a game, there will be people who want to make EA's games free-to-play on their own terms. That's the nice way of saying what happened to The Sims 3 recently. "We got pirated three weeks before the game launched," Riccitiello said. "And we were really quite nervous about it. We had a lot of telemetry about what the pirates were doing because the launcher was in the version of the disc [that got out.]... There's a lot of Chinese and Polish among those consumers. We know what they're doing. And we finally concluded that we were very happy that almost a million people downloaded the Fight Night demo in the first couple of days we put it out. And in a weird sort of way, the behavior we're starting to see based on sell-through and registration [with the Sims 3] is that we really might have just put out a really good demo."

Riccitiello laughed at his own remark, because he doesn't quite mean it seriously. I pointed out that he might not want to hold his breath waiting for all those Sims 3 pirates to convert to paying customers. "I don't think they will, based on their geography," he said. The point he was making, he said, is that EA's concern over being pirated gave way to a new, more constructive thought: "We were like, 'I think they've demoed the game.' That's probably good. We probably should have posted it on our website."

It's clear he's not entirely comfortable with this position, but perhaps that will come over time. It seems like he's beginning to recognize what folks at Valve had said for a while: "pirates" are just underserved customers. Focusing on giving those underserved customers more reasons to buy seems like a much better strategy than punishing all of the legitimate customers.

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I present to you the Death Metal Parrot (technically, a cockatoo). Related: Death Metal Dog. (Thanks, Dean Putney)

The Open Video Conference takes place June 19-20 in New York, and the event promises ample awesomeness. Speakers include, NYU's Clay Shirky, Harvard's Yochai Benkler, DVD Jon, Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman, EFF's Corynne McSherry, and many many more. I'll be delivering a keynote on Saturday afternoon.

Check out the full agenda here.

The organizers have kindly granted a discount for friends of Boing Boing: 15% off for regular/corporate attendees (you have to sign up before Monday 15th). Use this link. Entry includes access to the two-day event, lunch on both days, and a video remix dance party on Friday night! W00t.

About the Open Video Conference:

At this very moment, in 2009, we have a chance to ensure that internet video retains key characteristics of the internet at large. It's still early and things are looking good, but we need devices that play nice with each other, networks that aren't totally neutered, and playback and production tools that are low-cost (ideally free/open source) and easy to use. Developments like Hulu are interesting for the user, because they can watch what they want, when they want. But we don't want internet video to be a glorified TV on demand service. We want video to be a dynamic medium that invites clipping, archival, remix, collage, repurposing, and many other uses that are currently inhibited by law or by lack of tools.

Hope you'll join me there! - XJ

Matt_dk writes "In November 2008, Caroline Moore, a 14-year-old student from upstate New York, discovered a supernova in a nearby galaxy, making her the youngest person ever to do so. Additional observations determined that the object, called SN 2008ha, is a new type of stellar explosion, 1000 times more powerful than a nova but 1000 times less powerful than a supernova. Astronomers say that it may be the weakest supernova ever seen."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Above, a stop motion music video for the We Have Band track, "You Came Out". Created by the W+K creative team Ida Gronblom & Fabian Berglund and Blinkink director David Wilson. About the making of:

The face paint animation film is made up of 4,816 separate stills. Each and every frame was hand-painted, shot, wiped off and redrawn, slightly differently for the next frame in order to create a seamless sequence. This time-consuming process involved the band members lying still for two consecutive days in a studio.

In order to animate the singing bit, lip movement was created by animating a painted mouth on the singer Dede. This involved breaking the lyrics into phonetics and giving each sound a specific mouth shape. To make this as realistic as possible all the mouth shapes were painted on Dedes face individually and then shot.

Flickr set with all 4,816 frames of the music video. Neat. (Thanks, Tara McGinley)

Jia Jem made a dress out of real meat.

I chose salami because it's thin, keeps in one piece, and is quite cheap, and bacon because it looks very, um, meaty. I considered somehow vacuum-sealing sheets of meat with those sealers they have on the markets now, but the machines were too expensive for a one-time-only disposeable dress. I ended up using the K.I.S.S. method of construction, which involved a basic shift dress out of thick cotton. I layed the meat on top, then put clear vinyl over it and sewed tracks with clear thread. I used a wide stitch length to avoid perforating the meat to the point it might just... uh, slide down the bottom of the dress. I also blotted it all before sewing to get rid of as much grease as possible to avoid clouding the vinyl. Lastly, I made sure to bind the bottom of the dress with a strip of clear vinyl to catch drips. (I love talking about this; it's so disgusting.) The whole project took about 6 hours, and I kept it refrigerated until the party. Good times.

Meat Dress

Rodney Salomon-Prudo (above), a fisherman from Madeira Beach, Florida, netted a rusty old supersonic AIM-9 Sidewinder heat-seeking missile while fishing in the Gulf of Mexico late last month.

The missile was about 8 feet long. Such a catch is a rare occurrence, despite the fact that Air Force fighter jets test fire some 300 missiles each year in the area.

In fact, Florida's share of the Gulf of Mexico is a military test range. And Captain Salomon said he pulled two missiles off the sea floor during his two-week trip.

But he left the other missile behind -- "brand new and still beeping," the captain said -- which perhaps was for the best.

After all, Tampa Bay barely handled the excitement of one missile turning up on its shores Monday, hauled in by a fisherman who had strapped it to his boat for 10 days in rolling seas, prompting a 500-foot evacuation around the Tom Stuart Causeway, a media circus and a military bomb squad's visit.

But it was all for naught. At first authorities on Monday described the air-to-air missile as "live." But Tuesday the Air Force said it was actually "inert," the explosive warhead removed before it was test-fired.

Fisherman laments losing Sidewinder 'souvenir'; Air Force says missile found Monday wasn't armed (Tampabay.com)

Video Link. This This cleverly-designed umbrella allows you shrink to fit the sidewalk.. (Thanks, Stephen Lenz)

I dare not publish the photo, for it is far too disturbing, but I will link to it.

CNet is running a story inspired by comments from Ubisoft's Ben Mattes about how the Wii affects game development. When asked why there was no Wii version of Prince of Persia, Mattes said, "The reality is that from a technical standpoint, the Wii cannot do what we wanted the game to do. The AI of Elika was highly advanced and required a lot of processing power; the world size and dynamic loading, the draw distance, the number of polygons in the characters... If we had done a Wii version, it would have been toned down, probably linear; it wouldn't have been an open-world game, and so it would have been a very different experience." The article goes on to look at a number of Wii games that are stripped-down versions of their Xbox 360 or PS3 counterparts. Of course, part of the Wii's drawing power is that it's much simpler than the other systems, and has brought casual gaming to millions more people than it would have otherwise. The question remains, as Kotaku points out, whether the Wii's audience will persist after the other systems match its casual-gaming capabilities.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This art website listing says that white supremacist James W. von Brunn-- who also dabbled in painting -- lived in Maryland, and was "known for: [land]scapes, portrait, illustration, graphics." Well, not so much anymore.

Related: A white supremacist pal says he started sending increasingly more violent emails in the weeks before he is reported to have opened fire at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in DC on Wednesday, killing a guard. He gave away his computer just before the attack. Here's a Salon article on why he tried to kidnap the Fed earlier. (Thanks, Richard Metzger)

ShadowBanker, a comics-oriented econoblogger examines the economic rationality of the Batman villains depicted in Jeph Loeb comics like The Long Halloween and Dark Victory, which show the colorful villains acting in unlikely concert. From Batman Villains and Cooperation: A Utility Analysis:

For not killing Batman, we can obviously assign the Joker a utility of 0.
For capturing Batman on his own, let's assign the Joker a utility of 10.
For capturing Batman with the help of x other villains, the utility would be 10/x.

The last one is sort of tricky. This means that if the Joker cooperates with one other villain (say Two-Face) and together they manage to kill Batman, then the utility for each would be 5. In effect, this means that the villains "split" the utility of 10...

Now, let's assign the probabilities. I'm going to assume that each Batman rogue has a 2% chance of killing Batman alone (and this is being very, very generous and neglecting the individual skills of each rogue for simplicity). You would then think that adding villains to the scheme would increase the probability of killing Batman by 2% with each new rogue. Except, this ignores the economics law of diminishing returns, which states that as you increase the factors of production, the marginal benefit of those factors decreases. Usually, this applies to outcomes which are continuous (such as production of goods) rather than binary (to kill or not to kill Batman), but we can apply diminishing returns in this case to the probabilities. The theory is that as you add villains, working together will prove more difficult and planning more arduous. Therefore, the probability of getting Batman will increase, but by a marginally smaller amount with each villain added.

Thinking of probability as output, let's assume that in each state,
p = 2*y^0.9, where
p = probability of killing batman and
y = number of villains involved in the scheme.

From Should Batman Villains Betray Each Other? (Analysis using the Prisoner's Dilemma):

This situation is a nice example of the Prisoner's Dilemma. So, let's do a really quick summation of this two-player (Two-Face, Mr. Freeze), two-choice (Cooperate, Betray) game in Batman terms to show that it would actually make sense for the two of them to continue to cooperate, even though neither will. We must again assign some utilities for each player. I have done so, as the following normal-form game matrix represents:

Mr. Freeze -->> Two-Face ?	Cooperate	Betray
Cooperate	(5,5)	(0,10)
Betray	(10,0)	(3,3)

In this matrix, Two-Face is the player on the left and Mr. Freeze is the player on the top. Each has the choice of either cooperating after capturing Batman or of betraying the other. In each cell, the numbers represent the utilities awarded to the respective players given their choice of action.

Batman Villains and Cooperation: A Utility Analysis

Should Batman Villains Betray Each Other? (Analysis using the Prisoner's Dilemma)

(via io9)

Over at Wired Danger Room, Noah Shachtman -- who has been following this story longer and more closely than any journalist I know -- writes:

The Army has ordered its network managers to give soldiers access to social media sites like Facebook, Flickr, and Twitter, Danger Room has learned. That move reverses a years-long trend of blocking the web 2.0 locales on military networks.

Army public affairs managers have worked hard to share the service's stories through social sites like Flickr, Delicious and Vimeo. Links to those sites featured prominently on the Army.mil homepage. The Army carefully nurtured a Facebook group tens of thousands strong, and posted more than 4,100 photos to a Flickr account. Yet the people presumably most interested in these sites -- the troops -- were prevented from seeing the material. Many Army bases banned access to the social networks.

Read Noah's entire story, along with the full text of the operational order, here.

Here's an animation for the song Kashmir, used as a performance backdrop by Led Zeppelin for their reunion concert. Animation by Steve Scott. (via Arthur mag / thanks Richard Metzger)

Mike Sheldrake makes surfboards out of interlocked ribs of cardboard, coated in fiberglass sheet. He was at Maker Faire showing off some of his prototypes. I'm digging the natural materials as the core of the board, and the cool patterns in light that they create.

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Just got back from a few weeks in Guatemala, where some 20 murders a day take place, and about 98% of all violent crime typically goes unprosecuted, uninvestigated. Prensa Libre today, caption: "Today, the principle roads of the city appeared painted with white crosses, an action of the Civic National Movement to remember the victims of violence and impunity."(Photo: Prensa Libre: Óscar Estrada / via @morwac)

A bunch of folks have been submitting the story about how Jammie Thomas' new lawyer, Kiwi Camara (a Charlie Nesson protege) and Nesson himself are apparently preparing to file a class action lawsuit against the RIAA in an attempt to get back the $100 million plus that they claim the industry "stole" in its settlements. This may be interesting from an academic standpoint (or from a PR/circus standpoint), but I have difficulty believing it will get very far in terms of actually succeeding. I do find the settlements distasteful, and bordering on extortion ("pay up or we sue" is really questionable), but earlier attempts at similar lawsuits haven't gone very far at all. Still, considering that the RIAA has always insisted that its entire legal campaign was part of a grossly misguided and ultimately self-damaging "PR campaign" perhaps it's okay that someone is effectively doing the same thing on the other side.

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Mark Simonson's new version of a "fixed width sans designed especially for coders". Haven't given it a spin yet, but it looks/sounds excellent. #

theodp writes "If you're thinking about applying for that open U.S. cyber warfare czar position, Robert X. Cringely points out that you will have to effectively function as a WORLD cyber warfare czar, a fact that neither Republican nor Democratic Administrations have yet been willing to embrace, at least in public. The international nature of today's outsourced-and-offshored IT business has big implications for U.S. security. Try to do a security audit of your company's technical resources in Argentina or Bangladesh, suggests Bob, and see what nightmare is unveiled. Toss some random Code Gods into the mix, says Cringely, and it's really too tough to predict who might win in a game of U.S. vs. Albania."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Are living virtual people the future of videogames? In his latest Ragdoll Metaphysics column, Offworld's Jim Rossignol uses E3's appearance of Lionhead's Natal-enabled project Milo and Kate to content that the great games race of the future will be "one not of simulating worlds in more detail, but simulating humanity with greater fidelity," and creating "someone interesting enough to keep players engaged, and to keep them coming back." Elsewhere we showed off an achingly gorgeous gallery of hi-res screenshots of Team ICO's The Last Guardian (above), another game which rests its premise on the fidelity of companionship between a boy and his new-found giant baby gryphon friend, and went hands-on at WWDC with iPhone publisher ngmoco's upcoming lineup, including Rolando 2, more virtual friends with the Petz creator's Touch Pets: Dogs, and multiplayer first person shooter codenamed LiveFire. We also saw the latest best indie point and click adventure, Little Wheels, saw a homebrew NES game inspired by puzzle/RPG favorite PuzzleQuest, got a little retro arcade history lesson re: Konami's 'Morning Music', and got sucked into a post-it pixel world with music video DEADLINE. And the 'one shot's for the day: Edge Magazine shows off its brilliant games-reference jam-packed pixel poster, and Douglas Adams and Infocom's Steve Meretzky pose for a promo photo in celebration of their early 80's classic Hitchhiker's Guide text adventure.

Randy Sarafan made this stylish stereo microphone and writes:

It has come time for me to update my home recording studio to continue recording my own brand of intergalactic low-fi, disco, funk, folk rock. Rather than spend big bucks on a stereo mic setup that won't offer me the low quality sound that I am accustomed to, I have decided to build my own for next to nothing almost entirely out of found parts. Now I can get awesome panning effects that can easily be mimicked in software, but never truly replicated.

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koavf writes "More than a decade after experiments first produced a single atom of "super-heavy" element 112, a team of German scientists has been credited with its discovery, but it has yet to be named. The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry has temporarily named the element ununbium, as "ununbi" means "one one two" in Latin; but the team now has the task of proposing its official name." Slashdotium? Taconium? Man I shoulda gone into science so I could have named something sweet that kids have to memorize in classes.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I admit to being confused by the event that Facebook has planned for Saturday.

According to the Sydney Morning Herald: "At 2PM on Saturday, the social networking site will allow members to register their own user names to make it easier for others to find their pages."

That's 9PM Saturday here in Calif, btw.

What does it mean? Well, I'm sure I won't get dave or davew and there's a fair chance another davewiner will beat me to it. That means I'll have to go for one of my nicknames.

Why don't I have a chance at dave? Well, they're doing the usual Silicon Valley user generated content thing -- playing favorites. According to TechCrunch they're favoring journalists they "work with." Oy. Should we read that as "Journalists who write stories we like?" As if journalists need another reason for readers not to trust them.

But the thing that strikes me as weirdest of all is that after years of insisting that people only use their real names on Facebook, they've now set up a system where it will be virtually impossible for most people to do that, even if they want to.



If I cared more about Facebook, I'd have more to say about this.

I wish this period of the Internet would end, it's so exactly like AOL. I've seen this show before, I know how it ends. Only this time there won't be a Time-Warner to cash them out.

PS: Read Anil Dash's hilarious takedown of this mini-debacle.

PPS: For some reason Zuckerberg seems like a modern-day P.T. Barnum. You and me, we're either trained seals (the reporters) or fleas (users) in his three-ring circus.

From the MAKE Flickr pool

Behold Igaaks' CNC plasma torch-cut sunglasses, as demoed at a recent TechShop Durham monthly meeting -

Material is copper, bent by hand, then heat treated, then coated with acrylic.
[…]
The only thing it might need is some kind of padding for the nose, and after talking with folks at the Meet-up, I think a small piece of molded silicone would work.

Though they look decidedly retro-future, the original Inuit design dates back about 2,000 years!

Before the introduction of tinted sunglasses, the Inuit wore slitted snow goggles to prevent snow blindness when travelling in the brilliant sunlight of spring.

Read more on The Winnipeg Art Gallery's site

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Ihmhi writes "China's mandatory 'Green Dam Youth Escort' web filter software apparently has a series of severe flaws. In addition to not working on Linux or MacOS, traffic between the software and its servers is unencrypted." I'm sure it only gets better after that.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The transition to digital TV, and the shutdown of analog broadcasts, is set to finally go ahead on June 12, after a four-month delay was put into place by Congress. The delay capped off a process that's been pretty bungled from the outset, though things seem to have mostly come together over the last couple of months. Still, though, stories emerge about the 3 million or so homes that aren't ready for the transition, despite the time and money that's been spent on informational campaigns about it. It's been a pleasant surprise to see these stories largely unaccompanied by calls for further delays. The number of unprepared homes has fallen by half since the delay was announced in February, and a good way to get most of the rest (assuming they actually care) to follow would seem to be to go ahead and flip the switch. At this point, if people haven't caught on, perhaps it's the only way to get them to do so. And just in case any Techdirt readers are in that 2.8 million, hit dtv.gov or call 1-888-CALL-FCC to get info and/or help.

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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Everybody put on your helmet, Smivs writes "Astronomers calculate there is a tiny chance that Mars or Venus could collide with Earth — though it would not happen for at least a billion years. The finding comes from simulations to show how orbits of planets might evolve billions of years into the future. But the calculated chances of such events occurring are tiny. Writing in the journal Nature, a team led by Jacques Laskar shows there is also a chance Mercury could strike Venus and merge into a larger planet. Professor Laskar of the Paris Observatory and his colleagues also report that Mars might experience a close encounter with Jupiter — whose massive gravity could hurl the Red Planet out of our Solar System."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

From the MAKE Flickr pool

No - it's not jello! Senseless_ shares his recipe for a homemade drain cleaner -

Cooking up a pot of natural drain cleaner to eat away build up in one of our rentals while it/s empty.
7, 16 ounce bears, 5 punds of sugar, 3 packs of baking yeast and a box of Rid Ex. I'll let it culture a day or two then our it down the furthest drain from the septic tank and four days of not running water the gunk will get mostly eaten away before I run a snake through it and no caustic chenicals to eat my pipes...

Seems like a nice alternative to commercial chemicals - anyone have luck using other ingredients?

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Mike Croucher writes "Despite the fact that it is over 40 years old, Fortran is still taught at many Universities to students of Physics, Chemistry, Engineering and more as their first ever formal introduction to programming. According to this article this shouldn't be happening anymore since there are much better alternatives such as Python that would serve a physical science undergraduate much better. There may come a time in some researcher's lives where they need Fortran but this time isn't in 'programming for chemists 101'. What do people in the Slashdot community think?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

From the MAKE Flickr pool

Flickr member Zomie84 made this simple portable speaker set from a PET bottle, so it already fits a number of existing holders on backpacks and bikes. Check out the full instructable here.

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An anonymous reader writes "A few years back, a guy was arrested for possessing child pornography after techs at Circuit City found child porn on his computer, while they were installing a DVD player. The guy insisted that the evidence shouldn't be admissible since the techs shouldn't have been snooping through his computer — and a lower court agreed. The appeals court, however, reversed, noting that the guy had given Circuit City the right to do things on his computer — including testing out the newly installed software (which is how the tech claims he found the video). The guy appealed to the Supreme Court, who has declined to hear the case, meaning that the ruling stands for the time being. So, basically, if you hand your computer over to someone else for repairs, at least in some jurisdictions, they may have pretty free rein in terms of what they're allowed to access on your computer."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Last month, we were troubled by the fact that a judge in NY was even considering barring local newspapers from using photos of a politician handcuffed in their news coverage about him. The judge was afraid it could bias a jury, but the newspapers pointed to that whole "freedom of the press" bit. Vince writes in to let us know that the judge has in fact allowed the press to use the photos, correctly noting that the First Amendment issue seems to outweigh the others. Still, it remains troubling that the question even lingered as long as it did, and that the judge needed to justify the decision with such precise details (including the idea that it was okay because NY is a large metro area, and because the time difference between the photos and the trial). It seems like it should be pretty straightforward that a court shouldn't be able to get involved in the editorial decisions of a newspaper, so long as what the newspaper is printing is truthful.

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Anonymous writes "Engineering students at Duke University have taken advantage of the accelerometers in emerging cell phones to create an application that permits users to write short notes in the air with their phone, and have that note automatically sent to an e-mail address. The 'PhonePoint Pen' can be held just like a pen, and words can be written on an imaginary whiteboard. With this application a user could take a picture with a phone camera, and annotating it immediately with a short caption. Duke Computer Engineering Professor Romit Roy Choudhury said that his research group is envisioning mobile phones as just not a communication device, but a much broader platform for social sensing and human-computer interaction. Such interactivity has also emerged in the work of other research groups, such as MIT's Sixth Sense project, Dartmouth's MetroSense project, and Microsoft Research's NeriCell project, to name a few."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

While the EU has repeatedly said that three strikes-type legislation is a violation of basic human rights, there is a loophole. It's been said that it would be okay if there's an independent board reviewing the cases to make sure it's not just based on random accusations. That seems to have brought ISPs and the entertainment industry to the bargaining table in Denmark, where apparently they're trying to hash out the details on some sort of "Pirate Review Board" whose job would be to manage these sorts of disputes. Similar attempts have gone nowhere to date -- and the reports coming out of this one suggest the two sides are also far apart, with the entertainment firms trying to push the ISPs to take on more responsibility and expense.

That said, it's worth noting who's missing from all of these conversations: actual consumers. Effectively, the ISPs end up defending their customers here, but the interests may not be totally aligned. Now, some may say that "pirates" deserve no seat at the discussions, since they're the ones "breaking the law." But the concern is about those on the margin: those where fair use may apply or who aren't causing any harm to the industry. The entertainment industry likes to automatically lump every "pirate" together into a single group, no matter how incorrect or misleading that may be. Someone should be standing up for legitimate consumer rights in the setup of these sorts of panels. ISPs, alone, may not be the best positioned to make sure consumers don't get harmed by a "pirate" review board.

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This fantastic courthouse-scene-from-Back -to-the-Future cake was Flickr user Snot Boogie's wedding cake: "The cake was the clock tower and was red velvet. It was done by Caryn's Cakes in Atlanta."

Wedding Cake (Thanks, Jay!)

Casio has unveiled its first ultra-compact superzoom in the shape of Exilim EX-H10. Its 10X optical zoom starts at an extremely wide 24mm equivalent. Its battery can shoot 1000 images on a single charge (though the company doesn't state how its been tested). The 12.1MP camera also has a 3.0" LCD and features such as Auto Best Shot and Make-up Shot.

Kyle Brady writes, "Thanks to some perseverance and asking the right questions, SJSU professors are now prohibited from barring students from posting their code solutions online, as well as penalizing their students for doing so. A win for students, programmers, and copyfighters nationwide!"

Kyle's a student at San Jose State University who was threatened with a failing grade for posting the code he wrote for the course -- he wanted to make it available in the spirit of academic knowledge-sharing, and as code for potential future employers to review -- and when he refused, his prof flew into a fury and promised that in future, he would make a prohibition on posting your work (even after the course was finished) a condition of taking his course.

Kyle appealed it to the department head, who took it up with the Office of Student Conduct and Ethical Development and the Judicial Affairs Officer of SJSU, who ruled that, "what you [Kyle] have done does not in any way constitute a violation of the University Academic Integrity Policy, and that Dr. Beeson cannot claim otherwise."

There's a lot of meat on the bones of this story. The most important lesson from it for me is that students want to produce meaningful output from their course-assignments, things that have intrinsic value apart from their usefulness for assessing their progress in the course. Profs -- including me, at times -- fall into the lazy trap of wanting to assign rotework that can be endlessly recycled as work for new students, a model that fails when the students treat their work as useful in and of itself and therefore worthy of making public for their peers and other interested parties who find them through search results, links, etc.

But the convenience of profs must be secondary to the pedagogical value of the university experience -- especially now, with universities ratcheting up their tuition fees and trying to justify an education that can put students into debt for the majority of their working lives. Students work harder when the work is meaningful, when it has value other than as a yardstick for measuring their comprehension. I've always thought it was miserable that we take the supposed best and brightest in society, charge them up to $60,000 a year in fees, then put them to work for four years on producing busywork that no one -- not them, not their profs, not other scholars -- actually wants to read. Might as well get them to spend four years carving detailed models of ships from sweet potatoes (and then bury the potatoes).

And in this case, it's especially poignant, since Kyle's workflow actually matches the practices of real-world programmers and academic computer scientists: coders look at one anothers' examples, use reference implementations, publish their code for review by peers. If you hired a programmer who insisted that none of her co-workers could see her work, you'd immediately fire her -- that's just not how software is written.

Kyle's prof's idea of how computer programmers work is exactly what's meant by the pejorative sense of "academic" -- unrealistic, hidebound, and out-of-touch with reality. Bravo to Kyle for standing his ground!

How I Won a Copyfight (Thanks, Kyle!)

narramissic writes "It appears that after its initial review of a deal that would settle a lawsuit publishers and authors filed against Google over the latter's book search engine, the DOJ is leaning toward challenging the proposed settlement. The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times reported late Tuesday that the DOJ is now sending civil investigative demands (CIDs) to organizations involved in the deals, a more formal approach than its initial information-gathering efforts. But Authors Guild Executive Director Paul Aiken said the fact that the DOJ is reviewing the proposed settlement isn't surprising, considering Google is involved: 'Any big deal that involves Google is going to get a look from the Justice Department.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Earlier this year, we couldn't figure out how Facebook's lawsuit against Power.com made any sense. Power.com tried to aggregate various social networking accounts in a single place, so you could manage them all at once through a single interface. Yet Facebook charged the company with all sorts of complaints, including copyright and trademark infringement, unlawful competition and violation of the computer fraud and abuse act. Power.com asked for the case to be dismissed, but last month the judge sided with Facebook, but did so in a troubling way, by basically suggesting that since Facebook's terms of service prohibited these uses, it made it copyright infringement. Michael Scott points us to lawyer Jeff Neuberger's take on the ruling, and separately Tom O'Toole has a good analysis of the ruling. Neuberger states the following:

Judge Fogel concluded that the allegations of the complaint made out a sufficient claim of copyright infringement because Power Ventures "need only access and copy one page to commit copyright infringement." The court also found that the ToU prohibited downloading, scraping or distributing content from the Facebook Web site content except that belonging to the user, and that in any event, using automated methods, i.e., "data mining, robots, scraping, or similar data gathering or extraction methods" to access any content were also prohibited by the ToU. Thus, the court found that the allegation that Power Ventures accessed Facebook via automated means constituted made out a claim of direct copyright infringement, while the allegation that Facebook users utilized the Power.com interface to access their own profile pages made out claim of secondary copyright infringement.

Thus, because the terms of service said you can't do any automated scraping of the site, it's suddenly infringing? Even worse, the court found that even though the data being used by Power.com isn't owned by Facebook (it's the users') the scraping was still copyright infringement, because in order to scrape the non-infringing content, Power.com had to first "scrape" the whole page. O'Toole explains:

OK, so far the court has found that Power.com made unauthorized copies of the Facebook Web site. What about the fact that Facebook does not own the copyright in its users' profile data? Facebook surmounted this hurdle by arguing that the content of the Facebook page that surrounded the user's data is copyrightable and is owned by Facebook. According to Facebook, the Power.com scraper operated in a manner that required it to copy the entire Web page in order to extract the user's profile data....

Note that the court is conditioning its ruling on the assertion that the Power Ventures scraper necessarily copied the entire Web page before it processed the page and extracted the profile data. That comports with my (limited) understanding of how a Web scraper works. But is it true? If it were true, couldn't an argument be made that this is a fair use of the page? I'll leave that for better lawyers.

All of this seems a bit troubling, as it would effectively rule out scraping even non-infringing content, just because the scraper had to first read through copyrighted content to get to the non-infringing stuff. But, that seems to go against the entire purpose of copyright law. The fact that the scraper reads copyrighted content shouldn't mean that it's infringement. It's not doing anything with that content other than using it to find the content it can make use of. Anyway, this ruling probably doesn't mean all that much, since it was just to reject the dismissal request, but it does seem odd that the judge gave so much weight to Facebook's terms of service, and seems to indicate the mere act of scraping can be copyright infringement.

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Instructables user dedub01 chronicled the conversion of his hall coat closet into a well-insulated wine cellar. He writes:

I decided to build this website after becoming frustrated while searching the Internet for practical information on how to inexpensively convert a coat closet into a wine closet. It seemed like everything was either sites for companies that sell full-blown wine rooms, or blogs by people who converted their cellar / child's room into a walk-in wine museum. Given that (a) I didn't have a large budget, (b) I only had a closet to work with, and (c) I was going to build it entirely by myself, most of what's out there on the Intertubes was useless.

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thesandbender writes "The recent post about GM opening it's own battery research facility led me to wonder why the US government is pouring billions into buying companies instead of heavily funding useful research. You can give $10 billion to a company to squander or you can invest $10 billion into a battery research and just give the findings to the whole of the US industry for free. From a historical standpoint, the US government has little experience with commercial enterprise... but has an amazing record for driving innovation. The Manhattan Project and the Apollo Moon missions are two of the pinnacles of the 20th century scientific achievement, yet it seems to me that this drive died in the 70's and that's when the US started it's slow decline. To be true to the 'Ask Slashdot' theme... what practical research do you think the US government should embark upon to get the most return for it's citizens and the world?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

One of the things that tends to keep patent lawsuits in check between two larger competing companies is the "patent nuclear war" scenario -- which is that if one company sues the other for patent infringement, the latter company often can hit back with an equal number of infringement charges. Thus, the incentives are for companies to stockpile lots of patents, but not necessarily use them... though it does happen occasionally. While this may be seen as a net waste (spending on patents for the sake of stockpiling, rather than for any socially or economically useful purpose), at least it keeps the lawsuits in check. One of the big problems that many companies have with the rise of "non-practicing entities" who merely hold onto patents for the purpose of suing (the so-called "patent trolls"), is that this same deterrent doesn't work. That is, because these patent holders aren't making anything, there's nothing to countersue over. That leads to unequal power, and greater likelihood of litigation. In many ways (though, certainly not all), it's similar to terrorists attacking a large country whose army is designed to battle other armies from other countries. When hit by terrorists, the army isn't designed to fight back against a non-governmental army.

However, it looks like at least one company is attempting a rather novel way to try to hit back -- though it seems unlikely to work. Apparently Juniper was hit by a patent infringement lawsuit by a patent holder over some patents related to firewalls and intrusion detection. The individual who holds the patent happens to have a website where he lists his accomplishments, including the two patents. From that same website, the guy sells various services... and according to Juniper, by listing the patents and offering a service, the guy was implying the services that he offered were covered by those patents. However, the services aren't covered by the patents, so Juniper claims the guy is "false marking." This is a rule that forbids you from claiming a certain product is covered by a specific patent when it is not.

This seems like an incredible longshot, and the judge dismissed the first attempt to do this -- though Juniper has filed an amended complaint where it's trying this tactic again. Obviously, I'm not a fan of patent holders who try to stop actual innovators in the marketplace, but this counter-attack from Juniper doesn't make much sense, and hopefully, will get thrown out again as well.

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Esther Schindler writes "Does your favorite open source project need just a little extra functionality? As Esther Schindler explains in this IT World article, your company can encourage the developers to add the features you've been yearning for — for far, far less money than you imagine. She interviews companies who have sponsored "code-a-thons" for Drupal, Plone, simwiddy, and a set of applications for British Telecom, and provides specific pointers.From the article,'To ensure that the event happens and that it meets its goals, you must connect with the right members of the community and motivate them to work with you. "It's not like these people are paid to work for your interests," points out Brightcove's Whatcott. If your business already has project committers on its staff, then it's just a matter of leveraging existing relationships. But, says Stahl, "Someone less 'core' in the community might well have a harder time.'"

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One of my favorite projects is a favorite not for its complexity but for the effect it provides. In "Let's Rumble" from MAKE Volume 02, Craig Engler shows us how he added bass shakers to his home theater chairs to pump up the movie effects. I'm not much of a movie buff, but I love me some bass. Ready-made, commercial shaker systems are pricey. Craig experimented and found what worked best for him. Granted this piece was from 2005, so prices for components have gone up a bit, but you can still piece together this system for way less than a commercial package.

Check out Craig's full article here in our Digital Edition. At Maker Faire Austin 2007, there was a full-on couch iteration called the Tranquilounger that I sat in and never wanted to get up from!

You can also still pick up a back issue of MAKE Volume 02 (classic!) at the Maker Shed.

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You probably noticed that Apple announced the latest incarnation of the iPhone, the 3GS, earlier this week. It features mostly incremental upgrades over the existing model's features, alongside software enhancements that will work on earlier models, but it's still creating a lot of demand from existing iPhone 3G owners who want to upgrade. One speed bump, though: like any other handset it subsidizes, AT&T is only offering the lowest price for the new device to new customers, or people who are in the last six months of their contract. Since the iPhone 3G came out less than a year ago, that means users of the latest iPhone that want to upgrade will have to pay an extra $200. Which, of course, is making some of them unhappy. The iPhone's upfront price benefits from a hefty subsidy, like other devices AT&T sells, so the operator's going to treat its subsidy, and how it recovers it, pretty much like any other device. It may come as a shock to some iPhone users, but the device really is just another phone in the eyes of operators, and won't get them any special treatment. Another piece of evidence: the fact that some of the new features in the iPhone 3.0 software that Apple touted -- such as support for faster HSDPA data networks, MMS, and data tethering -- aren't yet available on AT&T, because the operator isn't supporting them (or hasn't figured out how to bill for them). That's more like the mobile world we're used to: innovation and new features from handset vendors making it to customers only with the approval of operators.

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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An anonymous reader writes "A New York Times story reports that, 'Opening a new front in the government's battle against Internet gambling, federal prosecutors have asked four American banks to freeze tens of millions of dollars in payments owed to people who play poker online. "It's very aggressive, and I think it's a gamble on the part of the prosecutors," Mr. Rose said. He added that it was not clear what law would cover the seizure of money belonging to poker players, as opposed to the money of the companies involved.' Many players are reporting that their cashout checks have bounced."

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