From Modern Mechanix, a Twitter-like machine from 1935, that looks like a prop from the movie Brazil.

Robot Messenger Displays Person-to-Person Notes In Public

To aid persons who wish to make or cancel appointments or inform friends of their whereabouts, a robot message carrier has been introduced in London, England.

Known as the “notificator,” the new machine is installed in streets, stores, railroad stations or other public places where individuals may leave messages for friends.

The user walks up on a small platform in front of the machine, writes a brief message on a continuous strip of paper and drops a coin in the slot. The inscription moves up behind a glass panel where it remains in public view for at least two hours so that the person for whom it is intended may have sufficient time to observe the note at the appointed place. The machine is similar in appearance to a candy-vending device.

Twitter in 1935 (Via Maikelnai's Blog)

Omega Recoil, Mad Electro-Makers Who Craft Giant Tesla coils (Download MP4 / YouTube)
We peek inside the electrified world of Omega Recoil, a group of engineers and "makers" who craft giant Tesla Coils, and stage humorous and thrilling performances with those large electrical devices.

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Miles O'Brien: Space + Aviation Update (Download MP4 / YouTube).

Boing Boing Video guest correspondent Miles O'Brien updates on the Space Shuttle, new information about the recent Air France crash, and confirmation that geese were responsible for the emergency conditions that led to the "miracle on the Hudson" emergency plane landing.

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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."

Via Michael Scott we learn that the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has found that the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) also applies to unsolicited text messages. The TCPA covers certain kinds of commercial marketing over telephones, and has a rule against the use of "automatic telephone dialing systems," but it wasn't clear if text messaging was an automatic telephone dialing system. The court has now said yes.

Separately, the case looked at whether or not agreeing to a basic terms of service also represented "express consent" which is needed under the TCPA. In this case, the woman had purchased a ringtone, but did not believe she had consented to commercial text messages. In buying the ringtone, the woman agreed to an extremely broadly worded terms of service that was probably purposely designed by lawyers to cover a wide swath of potential other things -- such as allowing the company to let others market things to the user. The question was whether or not other companies, who purchased the phone number from the ringtone company, could then market to the woman. The court here finds that dubious as well, noting that "express consent" is "[c]onsent that is clearly and unmistakably stated," which the court feels was not the case here, since the consent was only for the ringtone company to market messages, not anyone else (even though the marketing company -- in this case Simon & Schuster -- noted that the text message was "powered by" the ringtone company): "Thus, Satterfield's consent to receive promotional material by Nextones and its affilliates and brands cannot be read as consenting to the receipt of Simon & Schuster's promotional material."

This ruling isn't the final say on the matter -- as the appeals court was just reversing a lower court's summary judgment, and telling the lower court that it needs to actually go further in paying attention to the case. However, the points raised above are certainly important ones that I imagine will start showing up in other cases as well. Finally, it's also worth pointing out that the defendant in this case is Simon & Schuster, rather than Nextones. This does raise some interesting questions. Simon & Schuster believed that it was purchasing the right to contact these phone numbers legitimately via a marketing company partnered with Nextones. It had no idea that the "agreement" may be faulty, but it may now be liable for breaking the law. If that moves forward, you would have to think that Simon & Schuster has an argument to sue either Nextones or the marketing company it worked with for misrepresenting the "explicit consent" on those numbers.

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Via Michael Scott we learn that the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has found that the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) also applies to unsolicited text messages. The TCPA covers certain kinds of commercial marketing over telephones, and has a rule against the use of "automatic telephone dialing systems," but it wasn't clear if text messaging was an automatic telephone dialing system. The court has now said yes.

Separately, the case looked at whether or not agreeing to a basic terms of service also represented "express consent" which is needed under the TCPA. In this case, the woman had purchased a ringtone, but did not believe she had consented to commercial text messages. In buying the ringtone, the woman agreed to an extremely broadly worded terms of service that was probably purposely designed by lawyers to cover a wide swath of potential other things -- such as allowing the company to let others market things to the user. The question was whether or not other companies, who purchased the phone number from the ringtone company, could then market to the woman. The court here finds that dubious as well, noting that "express consent" is "[c]onsent that is clearly and unmistakably stated," which the court feels was not the case here, since the consent was only for the ringtone company to market messages, not anyone else (even though the marketing company -- in this case Simon & Schuster -- noted that the text message was "powered by" the ringtone company): "Thus, Satterfield's consent to receive promotional material by Nextones and its affilliates and brands cannot be read as consenting to the receipt of Simon & Schuster's promotional material."

This ruling isn't the final say on the matter -- as the appeals court was just reversing a lower court's summary judgment, and telling the lower court that it needs to actually go further in paying attention to the case. However, the points raised above are certainly important ones that I imagine will start showing up in other cases as well. Finally, it's also worth pointing out that the defendant in this case is Simon & Schuster, rather than Nextones. This does raise some interesting questions. Simon & Schuster believed that it was purchasing the right to contact these phone numbers legitimately via a marketing company partnered with Nextones. It had no idea that the "agreement" may be faulty, but it may now be liable for breaking the law. If that moves forward, you would have to think that Simon & Schuster has an argument to sue either Nextones or the marketing company it worked with for misrepresenting the "explicit consent" on those numbers.

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A concise, step-by-step analysis from the BBC on what may have gone wrong, technically, politically, and procedurally, in the Iran elections. Snip from one section:

[T]here was a 10-fold increase in the number of mobile polling stations - ballot boxes transported from place to place by agents of the interior ministry, which is run by a close ally of Mr Ahmadinejad. "One third of the ballot boxes were mobile," says Mehdi Khalaji, senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. "They were out of the control of the local authorities and the representatives of the candidates, and nobody knows what they have done to them".

Polling day saw a record turnout and Iranians queued for hours to cast their ballot in an election which all agreed was critical to the future direction of their country.

"Early on polling day, the SMS network was shut down, that made me worried about what was going to happen," says Tehran journalist Ali Pahlavan.

Suspicions behind Iran poll doubts (Thanks, Antinous!)

Damien1972 sends in a report on a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, which finds that wind power could provide for the entire world's current and future energy needs. "To estimate the earth's capacity for wind power, the researchers first sectioned the globe into areas of approximately 3,300 square kilometers (2,050 square miles) and surveyed local wind speeds every six hours. They imagined 2.5 megawatt turbines crisscrossing the terrestrial globe, excluding 'areas classified as forested, areas occupied by permanent snow or ice, areas covered by water, and areas identified as either developed or urban,' according to the paper. They also included the possibility of 3.6 megawatt offshore wind turbines, but restricted them to 50 nautical miles off the coast and to oceans depths less than 200 meters. Using [these] criteria the researchers found that wind energy could not only supply all of the world's energy requirements, but it could provide over forty times the world's current electrical consumption and over five times the global use of total energy needs."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Damien1972 sends in a report on a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, which finds that wind power could provide for the entire world's current and future energy needs. "To estimate the earth's capacity for wind power, the researchers first sectioned the globe into areas of approximately 3,300 square kilometers (2,050 square miles) and surveyed local wind speeds every six hours. They imagined 2.5 megawatt turbines crisscrossing the terrestrial globe, excluding 'areas classified as forested, areas occupied by permanent snow or ice, areas covered by water, and areas identified as either developed or urban,' according to the paper. They also included the possibility of 3.6 megawatt offshore wind turbines, but restricted them to 50 nautical miles off the coast and to oceans depths less than 200 meters. Using [these] criteria the researchers found that wind energy could not only supply all of the world's energy requirements, but it could provide over forty times the world's current electrical consumption and over five times the global use of total energy needs."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The National Institutes of Health has given $423,500 to researchers at Indiana University's Kinsey Institute to figure out why men don't like to wear condoms. The institute will also study why men have trouble using condoms and investigate "penile erection and sensitivity during condom application." "The project aims to understand the relationship between condom application and loss of erections and decreased sensation, including the role of condom skills and performance anxiety, and to find new ways to improve condom use among those who experience such problems," reads the abstract from Drs. Erick Janssen and Stephanie Sanders, both of the Kinsey Institute.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The National Institutes of Health has given $423,500 to researchers at Indiana University's Kinsey Institute to figure out why men don't like to wear condoms. The institute will also study why men have trouble using condoms and investigate "penile erection and sensitivity during condom application." "The project aims to understand the relationship between condom application and loss of erections and decreased sensation, including the role of condom skills and performance anxiety, and to find new ways to improve condom use among those who experience such problems," reads the abstract from Drs. Erick Janssen and Stephanie Sanders, both of the Kinsey Institute.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Check out this DIY wood-encased iPod Mini over at BB Gadgets!

An amazing piece by Borzou Daragahi, in Tehran, from today's LA Times on the life and death of Neda Agha-Soltan (shown above in a family photo). Her death, documented on cellphone video and spread online, has become a potent spiritual emblem for the popular uprising in Iran.

The first word came from abroad. An aunt in the United States called her Saturday in a panic. "Don't go out into the streets, Golshad," she told her. "They're killing people."

The relative proceeded to describe a video, airing on exile television channels that are jammed in Iran, in which a young woman is shown bleeding to death as her companion calls out, "Neda! Neda!"

A dark premonition swept over Golshad, who asked that her real name not be published. She began calling the cellphone and home number of her friend Neda Agha-Soltan who had gone to the chaotic demonstration with a group of friends, but Neda didn't answer.

At midnight, as the city continued to smolder, Golshad drove to the Agha-Soltan residence in the eastern Tehran Pars section of the capital. As she heard the cries and wails and praising of God reverberating from the house, she crumpled, knowing that her worst fears were true. "Neda! Neda!" the 25-year-old cried out. "What will I do?"

Neda Agha-Soltan, 26, was shot dead Saturday evening near the scene of clashes between pro-government militias and demonstrators who allege rampant vote-count fraud in the reelection of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The jittery cellphone video footage of her bleeding on the street has turned "Neda" into an international symbol of the protest movement that ignited in the aftermath of the June 12 voting. To those who knew and loved Neda, she was far more than an icon. She was a daughter, sister and friend, a music and travel lover, a beautiful young woman in the prime of her life.

Family, friends mourn Iranian woman whose death was caught on video (via @eecue)

Donny and Marie's 1977 send-up of Star Wars. Can you dig it? I knew that you could. More information here. (Thanks, Tara McGinley!)

I don't know what took me so long, but I finally got around to reading Bryan Lee O'Malley's inspired, hilarious, snarky, delicious graphic novel series Scott Pilgrim (though I know how I got around to reading them finally: I ran into Scott McCloud at the Toronto Comic Arts Fest and he said, "You have to read 'Scott Pilgrim,' it's about a guy who can only date the love of his life after he defeats her seven evil ex-boyfriends!").

I sent away for a review set of the first five volumes -- I'm not sure, but I think there'll be six in all -- but they were promptly stolen by my wife, who wouldn't give them back, so I had to buy another set at Forbidden Planet in London and then drop pretty much everything to read them, at speed, howling with laughter and turning down corners on pages I wanted to save for posterity.

The premise is pretty much as McCloud described it: Scott Pilgrim is a 23-year-old Toronto slacker who falls in love with an Amazon delivery woman who's just moved from America, but in order to date her, he must defeat her seven evil ex-boyfriends, who have a variety of super powers (my favorite is the vegan, who has the vegan power of moving things with his mind). On the way, we find out about Scott's friends -- slackers, successes, screw-ups, beauty queens, lovelorn ninjas, a whole charming host of them -- and his history and run through a series of genuinely touching, ha-ha-only-serious flashbacks about Scott's life.

The setting is crack for me, since it's the Toronto of my young adulthood -- they have one epic battle at Casa Loma, the weird castle where I got married; they spend their nights drinking bad beer and eating terrible food at Sneaky Dees, where I practically lived for several years, especially when they were a 24-hour joint on Bloor Street; and there's a brilliant fight-scene at the magnificently kitschy monster five-and-dime Honest Eds -- rendered with sweet affection and a good eye.

But the best part are the little tossed-up popcult fillips, like the 8-bit "PEE" status-bar that slowly scrolls to empty over a couple panels as Scott stands at a urinal, or the One-Up face that pings into existence when Scott earns an extra life.

Reading this reminds me of the first time I read Generation X and discovered a creator who was funny, touching, smart and plugged into many of the same things that my life revolved around. The Globe and Mail called it "Canada's Tank Girl," and I think that's as good a strapline as any. I can't recommend it highly enough -- and hey, there's a pretty decent-looking film-adaptation in the works, too!

Scott Pilgrim, Vol. 1: Scott Pilgrim's Precious Little Life

Scott Pilgrim, Vol. 2: Scott Pilgrim Versus The World

Scott Pilgrim, Vol. 3: Scott Pilgrim & the Infinite Sadness

Scott Pilgrim, Vol 4: Scott Pilgrim Gets It Together

Scott Pilgrim Volume 5: Scott Pilgrim vs The Universe

Scott Pilgrim - Comics By Bryan Lee O'Malley

gerddie notes a piece up on the EFF site outlining the fairly outlandish legal theories ASCAP is trying out in their court fight with AT&T. "ASCAP (the same folks who went after Girl Scouts for singing around a campfire) appears to believe that every time your musical ringtone rings in public, you're violating copyright law by 'publicly performing' it without a license. At least that's the import of a brief (PDF, 2.5 MB) it filed in ASCAP's court battle with mobile phone giant AT&T."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

gerddie notes a piece up on the EFF site outlining the fairly outlandish legal theories ASCAP is trying out in their court fight with AT&T. "ASCAP (the same folks who went after Girl Scouts for singing around a campfire) appears to believe that every time your musical ringtone rings in public, you're violating copyright law by 'publicly performing' it without a license. At least that's the import of a brief (PDF, 2.5 MB) it filed in ASCAP's court battle with mobile phone giant AT&T."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In the Make: Online Toolbox, we focus on tools that fly under the radar of more conventional tool coverage: in-depth tool-making projects, strange or specialty tools unique to a trade or craft that can be useful elsewhere, tools and techniques you may not know about, but once you do, and incorporate them into your workflow, you'll wonder how you ever lived without them. And, in the spirit of the times, we pay close attention to tools that you can get on the cheap, make yourself, refurbish, etc.

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I have a love/hate relationship with organizational technology. I'm an anarchist at heart -- I hate rules, authority, order, doing what's expected. At the same time, I have to manage a fairly dizzying amount of complexity in my workflow, and that necessitates having to be organized. I vacillate between embracing it (reading productivity books and sites like 43Folders and Lifehacker) and rebelling against it. Within these perpetual oscillations, I managed to get a lot of stuff done, so however torturous the process, it seems to work for me. Below is the content of my writing/planning toolbox. I got a great response to my call for tool suggestions for this column. I figured, since these tools work in concert with each other, to keep each contributor's toolset intact. This is only a sampling of what people sent. Many items were redundant (Moleskines, Maker's Notebooks, Sharpies, Varsity pens). Add your favorite writing tools (my emphasis is on analog, but digital too -- whatever you actually use and find most useful).

Gareth's Tools:

The Maker's Notebook
I know I was involved in this project and I'm far from impartial, but I love The Maker's Notebook, I got flamed out on Boing Boing for claiming that the Notebook actually *encourages* me to do more brainstorming, drawing, scheming, but it does! The Moleskine drawing notebook I used beforehand did the same thing. I think any great writing tool (or any type of tool) seduces you want to use it. I use my Maker's Notebook for all of my preliminary project planning, sketches, diagrams, and brainstorms -- at least any of this that I do away from the computer. This column started out as a page in my Maker's Notebook.

Moleskine Cahier Pocket Notebook (blank paper version)
I always keep one of these in my pocket. I've used them for years and have a nice collection of multiple volumes stuffed with my big (and little) ideas. I use these for miscellaneous thoughts, quotes I want to capture, book excerpts, fragmentary ideas, poetry and pearls o' wisdom. I've been writing a novel for the past couple of years and all of my notes for that are in about six volumes of these notebooks.

Hipster PDA
These simple paper PDAs were such an advancement for me. With a pack of 3 x 5 cards and a box of binder clips, I made a bunch of these that I keep all over the house (with a pen): By my bed, in the TV, kitchen, in the john, etc. Now I never have a thought and am without the means to capture it. I keep one of these in my pocket too and use it for shopping lists, to-do lists, temporary notes, anything I don't need to keep. The ones around the house capture any type of thought, and at the end of the week, I go around and collect up all the used cards and transfer them to notebooks or wherever else the info needs to go. This simple "creativity hack" has changed my creative/work life very dramatically (talk about bang for the buck!).

Omnifocus
This Mac and iPhone-based personal information manager (PIM) is awesome. It's built around the Getting Things Done system, to which I haphazardly adhere. Having my desktop Mac, MacBook, and iPhone all in-sync with my to-do lists for dayplanning/project outlining is a godsend, and it does it fairly effortlessly.

Evernote
I love this free app (for Mac, Windows, iPhone, and Blackberry) that allows you to send images, text, audio, and web clippings into the cloud from any of these devices. I frequently get ideas in the middle of the night, or want to record dreams. I speak them into my phone in bed and they're sent to my online Evernote account. Evernote also has character recognition within images, so you can, for instance, take a phonecam image of a business card and later search on the text of that card in Evernote or the text for something you've scribbled on a napkin and photographed. Just be sure to scribble legibly.

Varsity Disposable Fountain Pen
I've sung the praises of these pens before. I'm still singing. I freak out if I can't find one at my disposal and have to resort to a "lesser" tool. You can easily re-fill them yourself, so you don't have to dispose of them, which is good 'cause they're hard to find in stationary/ office stores (most of the time you have to special order them).

Pentel Mechanical Pencils
I've had the same Pentel pencil for the past 20 years. It still works and so I keep filling it with lead. I don't do that much technical drawing anymore, so I don't use it very frequently.

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In the last post, I showed the video of my presentation at the NARM event full of music industry and music industry retailers. I recognize that not everyone wants to sit through a 30 minute presentation (even though I promise that it goes quickly!), so I did want to highlight two parts of it separately, here in text, that I think are worth calling out. Both show companies that seem to (implicitly or explicitly) recognize what we talk about in terms of enabling artists to better connect with their fans and give those fans a reason to buy -- Topspin and Nettwerk. We've certainly talked about both in various posts, but execs from both companies were kind enough to share some data on some of their experiments that have not been reported elsewhere, and which I thought was worth sharing.

Topspin, of course, has built up a platform to better enable artists to both connect with fans and to give them a reason to buy, and has been able to work with some fantastic artists, both big and small, including Eminem, Paul McCartney, the Beastie Boys, Metric, Beck, Van Hunt, David Byrne and a bunch of others as well. The exciting thing is the level of success Topspin has found with these artists:

• The average transaction price across all Topspin artists has been $22. Compare that to the average price of a CD, which remains between $12 and $14. If you give people a reason to buy, they're willing to pay more. It's obviously not just about "getting stuff for free" as some contend.
• Even better, two separate artists using TopSpin have found that their average transaction price is between $50 and $100.
• Finally, one artist using Topspin has found (amazingly) that the average transaction price from what was being offered was greater than $100.
• And, on top of that, on one recent project, they found that 84% of the orders were premium offers (meaning above the lowest tier).

The idea that people just want stuff for free? Debunked. Give people a reason to buy in the form of real value they can't get elsewhere, and they absolutely will. About an hour after my talk, Ian Rogers, CEO of Topspin did a keynote interview at the same event. You can watch it here: Separately, we've definitely been quite impressed with what Terry McBride has done lately with some artists who work with Nettwerk, the indie label/artist management company. Terry's very much been a believer in the mantra of connecting with fans and giving them a reason to buy, and has even talked about how the whole concept of copyright has become outdated. His view isn't that this is necessarily a good or bad thing, but it's just the way it is, and in helping the artists he works with, they have to figure out ways to work with it. To date, that's included a lot of creative ideas for better connecting with fans and then giving them a reason to buy. One experiment he did was with the artist K-OS, who did a few different experiments, starting with allowing the fans to create their own "mix" of his latest album. Not a remix, but a mix. They released the stems of the songs before the album was released, let the fans create their own mixes, had them vote on the best, and then released two albums at the same time. One was the "pro" mix and the other was the "fan" mix. Then you could buy either one separately, or both together as a package.

The second experiment was the "pay on your way out" concert tour. Realistically speaking, this was a series of ten "free" shows. You could get in for free, but they asked you to pay what you felt was reasonable on the way out. Given the insistence by people that fans just want something for free, you would expect that very few would actually pay anything at all. Of course, that wasn't what happened.

Terry was kind enough to share with us some data from the experiment. Despite being free to come and go without paying anything, 63% of people attending ended up donating money on the way out. Now I'm sure some folks will mock this and say that he could have made more by charging everyone, but it seems quite likely that a lot more people came out to these free shows than if he had made people pay in advance. Almost two thirds of people ended up paying, totally voluntarily -- and their average donation was $6. Again, some will claim that this is low, but you have to look at the bigger overall picture. During this tour each of the two K-OS CDs were separately in the top 50 list of best sellers.

So, he gave a series of free shows that ended up bringing in tens of thousands of dollars combined (average attendance at each show was approximately 1,000 people) and it helped get a lot of people to buy both the CDs that were being offered in support of K-OS. Some people are going to nitpick the numbers, of course, but the evidence remains clear again: it's not that fans just want stuff for free. If you give them a reason to buy, an awful lot of them will absolutely buy.

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Hugh Pickens writes "The decision by the Washington Post to publish an article exclusively online has angered many readers who still pay for the print edition of the newspaper and highlighted the thorny issues newspaper editors still face in serving both print and online audiences. The 7,000 word story about the slaying in 2006 of Robert Wone, a young lawyer who was found stabbed to death in a luxurious townhouse in the Dupont Circle neighborhood of Washington where a 'polyamorous family' of three men lived, is the sort of long-form reporting that newspaper editors say still justifies print in the digital age and many editors agree that print is still the place to publish deep investigative reporting, in part to give certain readers a reason to keep paying for news. 'If you're doing long form, you should do it in print,' said newspaper consultant Mark Potts. 'This just felt like a nice two-part series that they didn't have the room to put in the paper, so they just threw it on the Web.' Editors at The Post say they considered publishing the article in print, but they concluded it was too long at a time when the paper, like most others, was in dire financial straits and trying to scale back newsprint costs. 'Newspapers are going broke in part because news can be read, free of charge, on the Internet,' wrote one reader in a letter to the editor. 'As a nearly lifelong reader of The Post, I could not read this article in the paper I pay for and subscribe to; instead I came on it accidentally while scrolling online for business reasons.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Hugh Pickens writes "The decision by the Washington Post to publish an article exclusively online has angered many readers who still pay for the print edition of the newspaper and highlighted the thorny issues newspaper editors still face in serving both print and online audiences. The 7,000 word story about the slaying in 2006 of Robert Wone, a young lawyer who was found stabbed to death in a luxurious townhouse in the Dupont Circle neighborhood of Washington where a 'polyamorous family' of three men lived, is the sort of long-form reporting that newspaper editors say still justifies print in the digital age and many editors agree that print is still the place to publish deep investigative reporting, in part to give certain readers a reason to keep paying for news. 'If you're doing long form, you should do it in print,' said newspaper consultant Mark Potts. 'This just felt like a nice two-part series that they didn't have the room to put in the paper, so they just threw it on the Web.' Editors at The Post say they considered publishing the article in print, but they concluded it was too long at a time when the paper, like most others, was in dire financial straits and trying to scale back newsprint costs. 'Newspapers are going broke in part because news can be read, free of charge, on the Internet,' wrote one reader in a letter to the editor. 'As a nearly lifelong reader of The Post, I could not read this article in the paper I pay for and subscribe to; instead I came on it accidentally while scrolling online for business reasons.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

To hear some in the industry tell it, the music industry is falling apart. Except, we're not seeing that at all. What we have seen is that sales of one particular element of the industry have come under much needed competitive pressure, and that's caused a few companies who relied too heavily on that area of business to finally start to recognize the inefficiencies in their business model -- which they're falsely blaming on "piracy." However, the rest of the industry is thriving. A couple weeks ago, I presented at the National Association of Recording Merchandisers (NARM) event, held in San Diego, about "success stories from the music commerce frontier," highlighting both artists and companies that were finding success, despite the "woe is me" complaints from both the big record labels and certain music retailers. Parts of the presentation come from older presentations, but about 2/3 of it is entirely new material, including the opening bit, built off of Clay Shirky's wonderful analysis of what comes next for the newspaper industry -- but applied to the music industry. The presentation itself runs about half an hour and you can watch it below (if you're in an RSS reader, click through to the page to see it):

NARM 2009 State Of The Industry: Michael Masnick from NARM on Vimeo.

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BcNexus writes with news from Minnesota that may have significance for cities around the US where municipal networks are either in place or planned: "Here's the latest development in a fight pitting a telecommunication company against government competition. The telco, TDS, took its fight all the way to the Minnesota Supreme Court because it thought the city had no right to serve people's internet, voice and television needs with its own network, but has failed." Also from Minnesota today, BcNexus writes "The State of Minnesota was the first to blink and chose to avoid a court showdown when it dropped its attempt to block online gambling sites."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

BcNexus writes with news from Minnesota that may have significance for cities around the US where municipal networks are either in place or planned: "Here's the latest development in a fight pitting a telecommunication company against government competition. The telco, TDS, took its fight all the way to the Minnesota Supreme Court because it thought the city had no right to serve people's internet, voice and television needs with its own network, but has failed." Also from Minnesota today, BcNexus writes "The State of Minnesota was the first to blink and chose to avoid a court showdown when it dropped its attempt to block online gambling sites."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This came to us from Dean McCully, by way of Jake von Slatt:

Take Flight is a hugely popular flying festival series at Northern California airports. We recruit up to 100 volunteer pilots of small airplanes and helicopters, and provide free flights for about 750-1000 young people with disabilities, at risk youth, homeless kids, foster kids, etc. Most of the kids get to take controls of the plane during their 30 minute flights, to experience the empowerment of being in absolute control of a complex flying machine.

We host simultaneous huge festivals at the airports, with 4000-5000 attendees expected to enjoy a fun day of hands-on stuff. The emphasis is on hands on STEM science/tech/engineering/math, pretty much precisely what Maker Faire is all about, just with a huge kids-fly-free component added. 200+ nonprofit agencies are expected to join us on August 8 and party with the crowds. We expect up to 4000 people to join us for the festival, making this the biggest aviation-based STEM science/technology/engineering/math festival in the Bay Area.

Everything is FREE to all attendees, all volunteers, and all nonprofits/vendors get FREE BOOTH SPACE! Free admission, free parking, free BBQ at noon, free airplane rides to kids 8-17 years old (must be pre-registered online), free live entertainment, petting zoos, hot air balloon rides, helicopters, radio controlled aircraft, model rockets, science experiments, games, rides, fun, fun, FUN!

To reserve a (free) booth in this hottest gig in town, all you have to do is RSVP online. We'll take care of the rest.

For more info, check our website.

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Cybeardjm points us to the news that Katy Perry, the pop singer, is apparently trying to stop a clothing designer named Katie Perry from selling clothes under how own name. Now, the details aren't entirely clear from the Billboard article here, but... Katie Perry (the designer) applied for a trademark for "Katie Perry" loungewear in September of 2008. Katy Perry, the singer, sent a cease-and-desist, suggesting that the designer was using a "similar name" to jump on the singer's popularity.

Oh, and just to make it even more confusing, the singer Katy Perry's real name is actually Katheryn Elizabeth Hudson, while the designer's real name is Katie Jane Perry, but she often goes by the name Katie Howell. Got that?

Now, there are issues with both sides here. While I understand why the designer wants to trademark her line of clothing, given the "common" nature of the name (and the famous singer who has one so close) it's questionable if that's a reasonable trademark claim. So, I think it would actually be quite reasonable for the singer to fight against the trademark being issued. However... I'm not sure it makes sense to try to stop the actual clothing line from going forward. After all, if it is designed by Katie Perry, then you could argue that the name is accurate and descriptive. So, the trademark request in the first place may be questionable, but so is the attempt to stop the use of the name at all in a line of clothing.

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eldavojohn writes "Another sign that digital cameras are slowly phasing out analog comes with Kodak's announcement to discontinue Kodachrome film. This should come as no surprise as Polaroid film was phased out long ago. At least the analog photography industry knows how to change with the times."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

eldavojohn writes "Another sign that digital cameras are slowly phasing out analog comes with Kodak's announcement to discontinue Kodachrome film. This should come as no surprise as Polaroid film was phased out long ago. At least the analog photography industry knows how to change with the times."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Over at Gizmo Projects, they tidied up their desk by installing magnets in a wireless keyboard and mouse so they can stick to the wall when not in use. I have a stand for my wireless keyboard (with built-in trackpad) and I love having actual desk space when I need it.

Up, up, and out of the way

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sehlat writes "From the Los Angeles Times comes word that in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, 165 public surveillance cameras are being set up to be monitored by a 'non profit coalition' of volunteers. The usual suspects, including 'the innocent have nothing to fear' are being trotted out to justify this, and the following quote at the end of the article deserves mention: 'But Jack Bauer, owner of the city's largest beer and soft drink distributor, calls the network "a great thing." His store hasn't been robbed, he said, since four cameras went up nearby. "There's nothing wrong with instilling fear," he said.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

sehlat writes "From the Los Angeles Times comes word that in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, 165 public surveillance cameras are being set up to be monitored by a 'non profit coalition' of volunteers. The usual suspects, including 'the innocent have nothing to fear' are being trotted out to justify this, and the following quote at the end of the article deserves mention: 'But Jack Bauer, owner of the city's largest beer and soft drink distributor, calls the network "a great thing." His store hasn't been robbed, he said, since four cameras went up nearby. "There's nothing wrong with instilling fear," he said.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

When you hear RIAA defenders insist that an unauthorized download is "just like stealing a CD" or something along those lines, it's worth noting even they don't really mean it. After all, if a digital file really was no different than a physical goods purchase, then you'd be able to do other things with it -- such as resell it. And yet, as you read through Eliot Van Buskirk's article about new online services trying to create marketplaces for people to sell their "used" MP3s, you'll see the scenario is quite different. After all, it's perfectly legal to sell your used CDs, but now when it comes to selling used MP3s you need a record label's permission? Why? Well, because even the record labels seem to inherently know that a CD is quite different from a download. So when the RIAA claims they're the same, what they really mean is "only the stuff we like is the same."

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The latest version of Auto Tune the news has a great beat and you can dance to it.

Artist Laura Levine was recently picking through 15,000 LPs she purchased for her Phoenicia, New York antique shop The Mystery Spot. She came across this treasure, Famous Photographers Tell How. It features advice from Henri-Carter Bresson, Bert Stern, Tana Hoban, Arhur Rothstein, and, my fave, incredible 1940s crime photographer Weegee, of Naked City (1945) fame. Levine and Ted Barron kindly posted select MP3s from the LP at the Boogie Woogie Flu blog. Choice Weegee quotes:

"Now the easiest kind of a job was a murder, because the stiff would be laying on the ground. He couldn't get up and walk away and get tempermental and he would be good for at least two hours."

"I will walk many times with friends down the street and they'll say 'Hey, Weegee. Here's a drunk or two drunks laying on the gutter' I take one quick look at that and say 'They lack character.' So, even a drunk must be a masterpiece!"

Weegee Speaks

Show notes here.

MP3 here.

Feed here.

icknay writes "With the upcoming Firefox 3.5 and HTML5 video, there's natural interest in Theora vs. Mpeg-4, but without much evidence either way. Here's clips encoded at various rates to provide concrete comparison between Theora and Mpeg-4. Theora performs decently, but requires more bandwidth than Mpeg-4 (although this is a 1.1alpha release of Theora and Theora has a much better license than Mpeg-4). The quality comparisons are very subjective, but you can try the clips yourself and see how it breaks down. There was an earlier discussion about this, but it lacked much concrete evidence. (Disclosure: it's my page.)"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

icknay writes "With the upcoming Firefox 3.5 and HTML5 video, there's natural interest in Theora vs. Mpeg-4, but without much evidence either way. Here's clips encoded at various rates to provide concrete comparison between Theora and Mpeg-4. Theora performs decently, but requires more bandwidth than Mpeg-4 (although this is a 1.1alpha release of Theora and Theora has a much better license than Mpeg-4). The quality comparisons are very subjective, but you can try the clips yourself and see how it breaks down. There was an earlier discussion about this, but it lacked much concrete evidence. (Disclosure: it's my page.)"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Not to jump into the territory that our prestigious guests Josh and Dylan cover so well at Atlas Obscura, but a friend just pointed me to Sacred Destinations' guide to "The Dead On Display." It's a fine survey of mummy museums, long-dead saints and their body parts, and, er, Jeremy Bentham and Lenin. Above, the body of St. Clare (d. 1253) in Assisi, Italy. Of course, for even more on this matter I heartily recommend Anneli Rufus's classic book Magnificent Corpses: Searching Through Europe for St. Peter's Head, St. Claire's Heart, St. Stephen's Hand, and Other Saints' Relics. From Sacred Destinations:

Incorrupt Saints on Display

* St. Andrew Bobola
Church of St. Andrew Bobola, Warsaw, Poland
Died in 1657, discovered incorrupt 1697.

* St. Bernadette Soubirous
Convent of St. Gildard, Nevers, France
The visionary of Lourdes, died 1879. Surely the most beautiful corpse you'll ever see (with some help from wax).

* Mother Cabriani<br> Mother Cabrini High School Chapel, New York City, USA
Italian-born nun, died in Chicago 1917.

* St. Catherine Labouré
Chapel, Rue du Bac, Paris, France
A Mary visionary, exhumed after 56 years.

* St. Catherine of Bologna Died 1463, has been on display in an upright position for over 500 years.

The Dead On Display (Thanks, Michael-Anne Rauback!)

"Life, Inc." author and former BB guestblogger Doug Rushkoff has a piece up on Daily Beast about the fanboy fallout over recent news of Steve Jobs' liver transplant:

Feel better Steve, but what about me? I mean, I know cancer surgery is no picnic, but what does the possibility that you'll reject your new liver mean for my Apple share price? Or my iTunes collection? Should I be converting it all to MP3? I just got a friggin' iPhone - what if you leave us before my five-year contract with AT&T ends? I made a commitment...How about you?

Sorry, but that's the emotional current underlying nearly all of the coverage I'm seeing about the Apple founder's just-revealed liver transplant operation in Tennessee for his metastasized neuroendocrine tumor. It's not what I expected from the Apple community, but perhaps it does serve as the most accurate expression of where the once-renegade personal-computer company has ended up.

To buy an Apple product is to bet on the longevity of the closed system to which we've committed ourselves. And that system is embodied--through marketing as much as talent--by Steve Jobs.

"He said all he needed was a little rest!" one commenter on the Fortune magazine Web site complained. "This is bullshit." On Bloomberg, all the talk is about share price, Apple's chronically cryptic and delayed press releases on Jobs' health, and whether this deputy Tim Cook is capable of taking the helm. Such "me-first" sensibilities don't fit with the highly humanized, creative individuals celebrated in Apple's early commercials--but rather the cultish consumers and shareholders that those commercials, and the products, actually succeeded in generating.

Apple's Army of Whiners

Total Dick-Head's David Gill gives us the following review of Christopher Miller's novel A Cardboard Universe: A Guide to the World of Phoebus K. Dank. Of course, Dank is a simulacra-of-sorts of pulp science fiction pioneer Philip K. Dick. Gill writes:

As a Philip K Dick scholar, I found it positively Dickian reading Christopher Miller's new genre-bender A Cardboard Universe: A Guide to the World of Phoebus K Dank. As the title suggests, the book is set up like a reader's guide to the fictional oeuvre of 300-pound eccentric science fiction writer Phoebus K Dank, with entries on Dank's most famous novels and short stories, along with anecdotes and biographical info provided by Dank's live-in literary specialist William Boswell and rival scholar and anti-Dankian critic Owen Hirt. I'd always wanted to write just such a guide to Philip K Dick's 55 novels. In fact, I'd been toying seriously with the idea for the last year or so. Looking down at this book in my hands was like that moment in every Philip K Dick novel when the Universe reveals itself as sentient by delivering some sort of demented synchronicity that points out a particularly painful personal failure. Miller's novel is the Spinal Tap of my life.

But Miller's Cardboard Universe is more than just a fictional guide to a non-existent eccentric's writings, it's a high-concept postmodern wang-dangler that puts dramatic irony in the box with Schrödinger’s cat, resulting in a kaleidoscopic fractal of mis-mashed identity, parallel dimensional weirdness, laugh-out-loud surrealism, and good old fashioned head-bashing violence.

The book may not be for the more thin-skinned of Dick's devotees as it clearly starts with a kind of cruel caricature of PKD: a socially awkward, eccentric, and agoraphobic writer. But the book does not rely on this fun-house reflection of Dick for laughs. Instead, Miller uses his formidable powers of imagination to create a wholly new character, a cross between Phil Dick, Inspector Clouseau, and Reverend Jim Ignatowski, the cab driver on Taxi.

This book could be bad, horrible, awful, a high-concept idea that falls flat. What redeems it, as I've hinted already, is Miller's enviable powers of imagination. He assails the reader with rapid-fire brilliance - half a dozen ideas I would love to have had, all condensed into short summaries of Dank's fictional output: 'Abrutophobia,' a short story about the debilitating fear of anything sudden and a man's subsequent usage of a drug to counteract the fear ('Gradual') which leads him to discover that his wife is really an avocado-shaped monster with eyes set on long dangling stalks. In the fictive novel Sadiators, future duelers attempt to convince each other to commit suicide during a timed match. In my personal favorite non-existent novel, The Salt Factory, salt made from human tears becomes a highly-prized commodity and as one firm struggles to keep their employees weeping constantly through a patchwork of sad movies, depressing music, and talking about their feelings, another firm moves to corner the market by using onions to produce (vastly inferior) tears.

Maybe The Cardboard Universe appeals to me because I know so much about Philip K Dick. I laughed out loud at the article titles in The Journal of Dank Studies: "Bonk!: The Head Injury as Epiphany in the Later Fiction of Dank" (think Bob Arctor's important head bonk in Dick's A Scanner Darkly), "No Vaccine: Dank's Subversive Fictions as Filter-Passing Viruses" (I've personally witnessed academic flame wars waged over Frederick Jameson's postmodern notion of the text as 'Rhizome' ), and my personal favorite: "Keeping It Up: A Feminist Reading of Dank" (written by a man, of course).

While some of the anecdotes about Dank are clearly based on Dick's life, the time is out of joint - so to speak. Dank was born in 1952 (Dick in 1928). In The Cardboard Universe, '2-3-74' does not refer to Dick's 'mystical experiences' with a pink light in 1974, but rather to Dank's transcendent joy upon the publishing of his first book. Dank has a long series of failed relationships with women, even starting a punk rock band to impress the nubile-and-uninterested Pandora Landor in 1998. The final and most marked difference is that Dick died in 1982 after a series of strokes, while Dank is brutally murdered in 2006.

Whether this book will appeal to non-Dick-heads remains to be seen. But, ultimately, I think Miller's work does stand on its own and my wife, who is pretty sick of hearing about Philip K Dick, laughed at many of the book's entries when I read them out loud to her. What's more, the book comes alive, confounds your expectations, and astounds you with Miller's high-octane imagination, rivaling brilliant genre-benders like Italo Calvino's If On A Winter's Night, A Traveler and Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire.

A Cardboard Universe: A Guide to the World of Phoebus K Dank</span

Previously:

• "The Most Brilliant Sci-Fi Mind on Any Planet: Philip K. Dick ...
• Philip K. Dick on Kurt Vonnegut - Boing Boing
• Philip K. Dick robot - Boing Boing
• Theory of Everything program on Philip K. Dick - Boing Boing
• R. Crumb's "The Religious Experience of Philip K. Dick" - Boing Boing
• David Gill interviews Jonathan Lethem about Philip K. Dick - Boing ...

26-year-old Derek Paravicini doesn't know left from right and had trouble counting to 10. He was born blind and lives in a home for autistic people. Despite his mental and physical disabilities, he is a wonderful pianist.

The entire documentary about Paravicini is on YouTube.

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5

(Via Microsiervos)

Late last year, we wrote about the odd case where a guy sued McDonald's over the fact that naked photos of his wife appeared online. Apparently, he had left his phone at a local McD's, and now claims that an employee uploaded the photos. As we pointed out in the original post, we had a lot of trouble believing that McDonald's, the company, should in any way be liable. What if the phone had been found by a random other customer? The situation could have been exactly the same, but would the restaurant have been liable? It appears McDonald's is making exactly that argument. Michael Scott points out that the company has made it clear that, if anything was done wrong here, and it was done by the employee, it was done well outside the scope of employment and it makes no sense for the company to be responsible for it.

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Al writes "Last Thursday researchers from Intel demonstrated a way to recharge electronics from about meter away using a 'resonant' magnetic field. At an event held at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, the researchers showed off a pair of iPod speakers connected to a 30-centimeter-wide copper coil that received power from a similar, but larger, copper coil about a meter away. The recharging technique relies on a phenomenon called resonant coupling, in which objects can exchange energy when tuned to resonate at the same frequency. A similar approach was developed by researchers at MIT in 2007, and spun off into a company called WiTricity. This company has already developed a few products that use resonant coupling to recharge, including a car battery."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Al writes "Last Thursday researchers from Intel demonstrated a way to recharge electronics from about meter away using a 'resonant' magnetic field. At an event held at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, the researchers showed off a pair of iPod speakers connected to a 30-centimeter-wide copper coil that received power from a similar, but larger, copper coil about a meter away. The recharging technique relies on a phenomenon called resonant coupling, in which objects can exchange energy when tuned to resonate at the same frequency. A similar approach was developed by researchers at MIT in 2007, and spun off into a company called WiTricity. This company has already developed a few products that use resonant coupling to recharge, including a car battery."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Trammell sez,

Magic Lantern firmware introduction from Trammell Hudson on Vimeo.

I've released a custom firmware for the Canon 5D Mark II that adds lots of new features that are missing for film makers. The video mode on the camera is an amazing step forward for independent films -- it has a full 35 mm sensor for "film-like" depth of field, it works with any Canon EF lens and it produces beautiful 1080p h.264 files at 50 mbps.

But the stock firmware has limited audio support and is missing many key features. So I wrote my own extensions that include onscreen stereo audio meters, over-exposure displays, crop marks for different formats, and higher-quality audio.

After a few weeks of private alpha testing and evaluation, I have released it under the GPL for other folks to be able to extend it further.

(If you don't have a 5D, check out CHDK for Canon's point-and-shoot cameras. It provides pro-level features for their low-end cameras, including a scripting language!)

Magic Lantern firmware introduction (Thanks, Trammell!)

Matthew Hutson interviewed John Hodgman about humor for Psychology Today.

Your delivery is famously dry. Do you ever crack yourself up?

I find it to be comedically unethical to laugh at your own jokes on stage. But I probably feel so strongly because it happens pretty frequently lately, and I am ashamed. My deadpan needs re-deadening (see my new book, on the various historical styles of deadpan).

But the reverse is true when writing. I generally only like a joke of my own if I make myself laugh when I write it. If my brain can fool myself into a surprised chuckle, even when I am the one who wrote the joke, my guess is that it can also fool you.

That said, it may be that those are just the weird, unconscious, half-literal "inside jokes" that only my brain and I get. For example: "Stun Gravy" gets me every time. But do you know what it means? NO ONE DOES.

Psychology Today interviews John Hodgman

The Daily Cross Hatcher interviewed comic book art historian Craig Yoe about his most recent book, Secret Identity, which is about the rare and nearly forgotten fetish art books drawn by Superman co-creator Joe Shuster.

We sat down with Yoe at the recent MoCCA Festival in midtown Manhattan for a conversation that largely revolved around the latter, a book devoted to the long lost SM drawings of Superman artist, Joe Shuster, which Yoe happened to stumble upon at a rare art sale.

Were the Shuster pictures fairly well-known in certain circles before the book was published?

Craig Yoe: No, they were totally unknown. I discovered one of the booklets at a rare antique book sale, and what made it so rare was that they probably only printed about a thousand copies of these. The mayor of New York assigned 80 detectives who descended on the Times Square bookstores who were selling these under the counter. They arrested the owners, and the case eventually went to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court, in a sad day for freedom of the press, banned these and ordered the copies destroyed. As a result, these are very, very rare and unknown to students of comic history.

Interview with comic art historian Craig Yoe

Dylan Thuras is a guest blogger on Boing Boing. Dylan is a travel blogger and the co-founder of the Atlas Obscura: A Compendium of the World's Wonders, Curiosities, and Esoterica, with Joshua Foer.

"While Parisians bought their tickets to watch the giant orb take shape, the project also captured imaginations abroad. The merits of metal balloons were debated at length by armchair aeronauts in Britain, including one who wrote to Mechanics Magazine to suggest an "iron balloon" 400 foot (120 metres) wide as "not contrary to the spirit of the times" - though, he allowed, it might "gambol about the Earth's surface with great danger to life and limb of the human race, as well as terror to animal creation generally".

The height of success for the floating, metal crafts was the ZMC-2, or "Tin Bubble", which "could reach a speed of 100 kilometres an hour, and it put in 2200 flight hours before it was decommissioned in 1941." Metal balloons made a short comeback in 1977 at "The Great Lead Balloon Contest." From one of the contest entrants

"The third balloon, the Lead Zeppelin took the prize. It too broke its tether and was last seen heading toward Logan airport - After some laughter on the part of the tower personnel, they began tracking our IFO (Identified Flying Object) and it was last spotted by a commercial aircraft out over the Atlantic Ocean headed toward Europe!"

We may in fact see metal Zeppelins again, as plans for futuristic blimp the "Turtle" are for a 200mph, solar powered, gigantic metal ballon.

Link to the wonderful Paul Collins article (his histories are practically reason enough to subscribe to the magazine), a post at the ADL Chronicles the 1977 "The Great Lead Balloon Contest" and a link to a youtube of the Mythbusters who, in 2008, created and floated their very own lead ballon, and to the "Turtle" a planned eco-friendly metal blimp.

Joshua Foer is a guest blogger on Boing Boing. Joshua is a freelance science journalist and the co-founder of the Atlas Obscura: A Compendium of the World's Wonders, Curiosities, and Esoterica, with Dylan Thuras.

A user named Sam E. just added the "ostrich-footed" Vadoma tribe of Zimbabwe to to the Atlas Obscura. Due to a single autosomal dominant mutation on chromosome seven, a significant portion of the population is ectrodactylous, or two-toed:

Derogatorily referred to as the "ostrich people," the Vadoma of western Zimbabwe suffer from a rare genetic condition called ectrodactyly, which affects one in four children within the population. Ectrodactyly, or "lobster claw syndrome," can effect either the hands and feet. In the case of the Vadoma, the middle three toes are absent and the two outer ones are turned inward... Some have theorized that the mutation may have adaptive benefit if it aids in tree climbing. However, it's more likely that the defect remains prevalent because of rampant inbreeding. It is against tribal law for members to marry outside the group.

My cursory Google Scholar search only turned up a single 24-year-old journal article [pdf] on the Vadoma (sometimes spelled Wadoma). Anyone know anything else about them?

Hugh Pickens writes "Nature reports that the US military has abruptly ended an informal arrangement that allowed scientists access to data on incoming meteors from classified surveillance satellites, dealing a blow to the astronomers and planetary scientists who used the information to track space rocks. 'These systems are extremely useful,' says astronomer Peter Brown, at the University of Western Ontario. 'I think the scientific community benefited enormously.' Meteor data came from the Defense Support Program (DSP) satellite network consisting of infrared satellites in geosynchronous orbit to monitor the globe for missile launches or atmospheric nuclear blasts, forming the principal component of the United States' ballistic missile early-warning system. The satellites' effectiveness was demonstrated during Desert Storm, when DSP detected the launch of Iraqi Scud missiles and provided warning to civilian populations and coalition forces in Israel and Saudi Arabia. As a side benefit, the satellites could also precisely detect the time, position, altitude and brightness of meteors as they entered Earth's atmosphere, information the military didn't consider particularly useful, or classified. 'It was being dropped on the floor,' says former Air Force captain Brian Weeden. Although the reason for ending the arrangement remains unclear, Weeden notes that it coincides with the launch of a new generation of surveillance satellites and speculates that the Pentagon may not want details of the new satellites' capabilities to be made public, or it may simply lack the expensive software needed to handle classified and declassified data simultaneously. 'The decision may have been made that it was perhaps too difficult to disclose just these data.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Hugh Pickens writes "Nature reports that the US military has abruptly ended an informal arrangement that allowed scientists access to data on incoming meteors from classified surveillance satellites, dealing a blow to the astronomers and planetary scientists who used the information to track space rocks. 'These systems are extremely useful,' says astronomer Peter Brown, at the University of Western Ontario. 'I think the scientific community benefited enormously.' Meteor data came from the Defense Support Program (DSP) satellite network consisting of infrared satellites in geosynchronous orbit to monitor the globe for missile launches or atmospheric nuclear blasts, forming the principal component of the United States' ballistic missile early-warning system. The satellites' effectiveness was demonstrated during Desert Storm, when DSP detected the launch of Iraqi Scud missiles and provided warning to civilian populations and coalition forces in Israel and Saudi Arabia. As a side benefit, the satellites could also precisely detect the time, position, altitude and brightness of meteors as they entered Earth's atmosphere, information the military didn't consider particularly useful, or classified. 'It was being dropped on the floor,' says former Air Force captain Brian Weeden. Although the reason for ending the arrangement remains unclear, Weeden notes that it coincides with the launch of a new generation of surveillance satellites and speculates that the Pentagon may not want details of the new satellites' capabilities to be made public, or it may simply lack the expensive software needed to handle classified and declassified data simultaneously. 'The decision may have been made that it was perhaps too difficult to disclose just these data.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ah, those collection societies just never learn, do they? We've discussed in the past how ASCAP once threatened the Girl Scouts for singing songs around the campfire, but in the past few years it's been ASCAP's counterpart in the UK that's been in the news the most for things like threatening small business owners after calling them on the phone and saying they hear music in the background or threatening a stable owner for playing the radio to her horses. I guess ASCAP was feeling a bit left out. Its latest move is to claim that legally purchased ringtones on mobiles phones, playing in public places, represents a public performance for which it is owed royalties. Songwriters and music publishers already are paid royalties on ringtone purchases, but ASCAP is claiming that buying the file is entirely different than "the performance" (i.e., the phone ringing).

In the EFF's response to ASCAP, it notes that copyright law makes a specific exemption for performances made "without any purpose of direct or indirect commercial advantage." ASCAP counters that even if that's true, only the owners of mobile phones can make that assertion, but the mobile operators (AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, etc.) still need to pay up for performance rights because they are commercial entities, even if the use of the phones is not. The EFF goes on to point out how this reasoning does not mesh with the law, the case law, or the intended purpose of copyright.

On top of this, even if, in some bizarre, twisted interpretation of the law, a ringtone playing on a phone was a public performance, how would it be the mobile operators' liability to pay? That would be like saying that Apple should pay ASCAP royalties because songs it sells on iTunes could potentially be played through speakers publicly somewhere. Perhaps I shouldn't be giving ASCAP ideas...

However, this is not a surprise. It's simply the way industry groups (even those representing the songwriters, rather than the labels) have always worked. It's always about "extending" rights. That's why copyright was broken down eventually into different types of rights -- including distribution rights and performance rights, because the "old" rights didn't fit the new technologies. It's a particularly obnoxious trick to claim that, because a single file can be used in multiple ways (for both distribution and performance), it is now subject to both types of royalties. The only reason those separate royalties were broken out in the first place was due to angry demands from these sorts of groups about how the old "rights" didn't cover new media versions of content. To then double back and claim multiple coverage is beyond obnoxious.

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PL/SQL Guy writes "Many bloggers have accepted perks such as free laptops, trips to Europe, $500 gift cards or even thousands of dollars for a 200-word post. Bloggers vary in how they disclose such freebies, if they do so at all. But now the Federal Trade Commission is paying attention. New guidelines, expected to be approved late this summer with possible modifications, would clarify that the agency can go after bloggers — as well as the companies that compensate them — for any false claims or failure to disclose conflicts of interest. Bloggers complain that with FTC oversight, they'd be too worried about innocent posts getting them in trouble, because the common practice of posting a graphical ad or a link to an online retailer — and possibly getting commissions for any sales from it — would be enough to trigger oversight."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

PL/SQL Guy writes "Many bloggers have accepted perks such as free laptops, trips to Europe, $500 gift cards or even thousands of dollars for a 200-word post. Bloggers vary in how they disclose such freebies, if they do so at all. But now the Federal Trade Commission is paying attention. New guidelines, expected to be approved late this summer with possible modifications, would clarify that the agency can go after bloggers — as well as the companies that compensate them — for any false claims or failure to disclose conflicts of interest. Bloggers complain that with FTC oversight, they'd be too worried about innocent posts getting them in trouble, because the common practice of posting a graphical ad or a link to an online retailer — and possibly getting commissions for any sales from it — would be enough to trigger oversight."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader wrote in to say "A friend of mine who just got an iPhone 3GS and has Mobile Me just used the "Find my iPhone" feature to track down his lost and subsequently stolen iPhone. This story involves three nerds wandering sketchy streets with a MacBook, and ends with a confrontation at a bus stop."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader wrote in to say "A friend of mine who just got an iPhone 3GS and has Mobile Me just used the "Find my iPhone" feature to track down his lost and subsequently stolen iPhone. This story involves three nerds wandering sketchy streets with a MacBook, and ends with a confrontation at a bus stop."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader wrote in to say "A friend of mine who just got an Iphone 3GS and has Mobile Me just used the "Find my Iphone" feature to track down his lost and subsequently stolen iphone. This story involves 3 nerds wandering sketchy streets with a Macbook, and ends with a confrontation at a bus stop."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ireland has not implemented any sort of "three strikes" law for getting ISPs to kick file sharers off the internet, but don't tell that to the recording industry there. A little over a year ago, you may recall that the recording industry sued leading Irish ISP Eircom, claiming that its failure to stop file sharing on its network broke the law. That was quite a claim -- and about the only actual "evidence" was that because some execs from Eircom had some internal emails where they joked about piracy, then obviously the ISP was guilty. Rather than deal with an expensive court proceeding, Eircom quickly settled, and agreed to put in place a three strikes rule (despite being under no legal obligation to do so).

However, because Eircom was worried about the competitive nature of the industry -- and how users might flock to other ISPs, it apparently had the labels agree to go after other ISPs as well. In fact, very soon after the agreement, the local recording industry association (the Irish Recorded Music Association -- IRMA) sent letters to other ISPs falsely claiming that under European law, they too needed to implement three strikes -- to which those ISPs responded by pointing out the law said no such thing.

Apparently IRMA would like to put that to the test. It's now sued two other Irish ISPs: the second largest telco (BT Ireland) and the largest cable ISP, UPC Ireland. UPC Ireland seems ready to vigorously defend itself, noting: "There is no basis under Irish law requiring ISPs to control, access or block the internet content its users download. In addition, the rights-holders' proposal gives rise to serious concerns for data privacy and consumer contract law."

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This month's Dorkbot London looks like a smashing good time:

Something good - Douglas Repetto: The founder of dorkbot visits from NYC to spin us a fine tale.

Electricity - Mike Harrison: Expect high voltages.

Open source embroidery - Ele Carpenter: Investigating the relationship between programming for embroidery and computing.

Lunar Lander - Iain Sharp: A mechanical recreation of the classic arcade game.

Dorkbot London

19:00-22:00, 23 June 2009

Limehouse town hall, the boxing club, limehouse town hall,

646 Commercial Road, E14 7HA

Image above is CC by Flickr user sh1mmer.

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Robbo sez, "Artist Stephane Halleaux makes incredibly imaginative, detailed and character-laden steampunk robot scultpures. It's steampunk. It's robots. What's not to love?"

Apart from the unlinkable Flash-blob "website," nothing!

Stephane Halleux - Sculpteur (Thanks, Robbo!)

(Image: Muriel Thies)

James Love from Knowledge Ecology International sez, "This blog gives some quotes from David Kappos, the IBM patent lawyer Obama has picked to head the USPTO. The appointment should warm the hearts of people who have been disappointed in some of Obama's early moves on IP policy."

What's happening at the moment is that IBM's IP lawyers are being aligned along a new philosophical axis. Under the leadership of Palmisano and the direction of Dr John E Kelly III, IBM's senior vice-president for technology and intellectual property, the approach to patent protection is shifting. After years of strenuously protecting all its patents the company is now backing the movement towards open standards. And this is changing everything.

'We are now the biggest supporters of the open source development project,' explains David. 'Admittedly this policy is not easily reconcilable with our traditional IP strategy, but we are convinced that it is the way to go for the future.'

President Obama picks David Kappos as USPTO Director, first open source fan to run USPTO (Thanks, Jamie!)

A member of Germany's Social Democrat party has defected for the Pirate Party, making him the first Pirate Party member in German parliament. Glyn explains, "Tauss left the Social Democrats after the party helped to pass a law mandating ISPs block a list of websites in a attempt to stop child porn. Tauss argues that it's the first step towards an extensive Internet censorship regimen and it will not work in its stated aim."

Tauss is being investigated for possession of child porn images that he says he downloaded as part of his ministerial investigation into the propagation of child porn.

Although Tauss is known for his experience in information technology matters and he has a track record in investigating child porn websites, he said the decision to give the government powers to close such sites down is a mistake.

He released a statement on Friday explaining his departure from the SPD, saying that although he agreed with many points of the party's programme, there was a "terrible wrong turn eing taken" in domestic, legal and internet policy.

He promised to continue to vote with the SPD in matters unrelated to these topics, but the party has demanded he step down from his parliamentary seat.

Tauss becomes first 'Pirate' in parliament after leaving SPD (Thanks, Glyn and everyone else who suggested this!)

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Reporters Without Borders is alarmed by the fact that no less than 23 journalists have been arrested in Iran in the week following the elections, making Iran one of the most dangerous places in the world to be a journalist. Online activists are trying to counter this trend by giving advice for helping Iranian protesters. One problem is that Iranian leaders are trying to delegitimize the reform movement by pretending that the reformers are puppets of foreign powers, so special discretion is required for anyone wanting to help the Iranian people."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Reporters Without Borders is alarmed by the fact that no less than twenty-three journalists have been arrested in Iran in the week following the elections, making Iran one of the most dangerous places in the world to be a journalist. Online activists are trying to counter this trend by giving advice for helping Iranian protesters. One problem is that Iranian leaders are trying to delegitimize the reform movement by pretending that they're puppets of foreign powers, so special discretion is required for anyone wanting to help the Iranian people."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Historic Lancaster, PA is about to become the most surveilled town in America (though they've got nothing on London, where we have 14 cameras per red blood cell and yet still, this unmanageably gigantic mountain of meaningless video surveillance hasn't magically made all the criminals turn honest).

Some 165 closed-circuit TV cameras soon will provide live, round-the-clock scrutiny of nearly every street, park and other public space used by the 55,000 residents and the town's many tourists. That's more outdoor cameras than are used by many major cities, including San Francisco and Boston.

Unlike anywhere else, cash-strapped Lancaster outsourced its surveillance to a private nonprofit group that hires civilians to tilt, pan and zoom the cameras -- and to call police if they spot suspicious activity. No government agency is directly involved...

Mary Pat Donnellon, head of Mission Research, a local software company, vowed to move if she finds one on her block. "I don't want to live like that," she said. "I'm not afraid. And I don't need to be under surveillance."

"No one has the right to know who goes in and out my front door," agreed David Mowrer, a laborer for a company that supplies quarry pits. "That's my business. That's not what America is about."...

Mary Catherine Roper, staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania, says the coalition's role as a self-appointed, self-policed gatekeeper for blanket surveillance of an entire city is unique.

"This is the first time, the only time, I've heard of it anywhere," she said. "It is such a phenomenally bad idea that it is stunning to me."

She said the coalition structure provides no public oversight or accountability, and may be exempt from state laws governing release of public records.

"When I hear people off the street can come in and apply to watch the camera on my street, now I'm terrified," she added. "That could be my nosy neighbor, or my stalker ex-boyfriend, or a burglar stalking my home."

Jack Bauer, owner of the city's largest beer and soft drink distributor, calls the network "a great thing." His store hasn't been robbed, he said, since four cameras went up nearby. "There's nothing wrong with instilling fear," he said.

Lancaster, Pa., keeps a close eye on itself (Thanks, Timothy!)

Dave sez, "Those AOL disks that kept coming in the mail for years, squirreled away for 'future unknown use', were used to shim up a carpentry trim project."

Shimming Dormer Window Ledge with Scrap Wood and AOL Disks, June 21, 2009 (Thanks, Dave!)

A Nokia-Seimens joint venture supplied the key surveillance tech to the Iranian government that is being used to spot and bust protestors, subjecting them to massive human rights violations and endangering their lives. Seimens says it's all Nokia's fault, and a spokesman says they did nothing wrong because spying on and torturing dissidents is legal in Iran.

Meanwhile, Cisco and every other "western" network tech company is busily selling spyware, censorware, and other surveillance crap to every repressive government in the world, and also raking in big bucks selling unconstitutional wiretap tools to the US government for use on domestic populations (including, it turns out, former presidents).

Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN), a joint venture between the Finnish cell-phone giant Nokia and German powerhouse Siemens, delivered what is known as a monitoring center to Irantelecom, Iran's state-owned telephone company.

A spokesman for NSN said the servers were sold for "lawful intercept functionality," a technical term used by the cell-phone industry to refer to law enforcement's ability to tap phones, read e-mails and surveil electronic data on communications networks.

In Iran, a country that frequently jails dissidents and where regime opponents rely heavily on Web-based communication with the outside world, a monitoring center that can archive these intercepts could provide a valuable tool to intensify repression...

Ben Roome, a spokesman for NSN, said, "We provide these systems to be used under the applicable laws in their countries and make sure we are abiding by U.N. and [European Union] export regulations and code of conduct. We provided the monitoring center to Irantelecom. We are not going to comment on the use of it. It is there to record lawful intercepts." ...

"My first reaction is, 'Wow! Why do they do this?' Don't they know that this will be used against the people of Iran?" said Mr. Sazegara, who now lives in the United States.

"They facilitate a regime which easily violates human rights in Iran and the privacy of the people of Iran. They have facilitated the regime with a high technology that allows them to monitor every student activist, every women's rights activist, every labor activist and every ordinary perso

Fed contractor, cell phone maker sold spy system to Iran (Thanks, Bill and everyone else who suggested this!)

Darren sez, "The City of Toronto apparently didn't think their ethnically-ambiguous stock photography was diverse enough. They did a poor job of adding a happy African-Canadian to the mix."

"The policy doesn't say PhotoShop, the policy says 'show diversity' and that's of course what we try and do because we want all of our publications to reflect the community that we serve," explained Mr. Sack, who oversees city communications. "That's only fair. People should see themselves reflected in city services because it's everyone who uses them."

"When you're publishing something with the deadlines and you don't have the right photo, the objective is to communicate the service," Mr. Sack said.

"We're in one of the most diverse cities in the world. I hope that doesn't pose a problem for anybody. Capturing that diversity is not difficult. That's been our general experience."

I'm divided on this. I think the real problem is that they couldn't find a piece of diverse stock art, and opted for a ham-fisted photoshop job rather than a more detailed search of their stock catalogs. I don't see anything wrong (and I do see plenty right!) with trying to find photos for government publications that reflect the ethnic makeup of the citizens the government serves. Toronto is a fantastically, famously diverse place, and it's good to see the city trying to reflect that. But they should do better than this!

City digitally adds black guy to Fun Guide cover to make it more 'inclusive' (Thanks, Darren and everyone else who suggested this!)

It turns out that there's an undocumented restriction on Kindle books -- if you download them "too many" (where "too many" is a secret number) times to your Kindle or iPhone or whatever, you run out of downloads and can't get copies anymore.

Months ago, an Amazon manager wrote to me to tell me that the Kindle now had DRM-free options for ebooks, and to ask if I had any questions. I had three questions:

1. Is there anything in the Kindle EULA that prohibits moving your purchased DRM-free Kindle files to a competing device?

2. Is there anything in the Kindle file-format (such as a patent or trade-secret) that would make it illegal to produce a Kindle format-reader or converter for a competing device?

3. What flags are in the DRM-free Kindle format, and can a DRM-free Kindle file have its features revoked after you purchase it?

He never answered them. After promising to get back to me, he just disappeared and stop answering my emails. I wrote to Amazon later on behalf of the Guardian newspaper, asking the same thing, and they never replied to that, either. And my contact at O'Reilly, who are releasing their entire catalog as DRM-free Kindle books, has been blown off by his Amazon contact on these questions, too.

The news about a secret limit on downloads is part of #3: we found out the hard way that Amazon can revoke your Kindle's ability to read your ebooks aloud after you've bought them. Now we discover that there is a secret counter that limits your refreshes of your Kindle library (say, across multiple Kindle devices as you upgrade, or replace lost, broken or defective units).

It may be that the market would be willing to pay Kindle book prices for books with these restrictions (and whichever other ones are lurking in the shadows), but it's just not fair or right for a company that prides itself on being customer-centered to refuse to tell you what you're buying when you buy its ebooks.

When I got the Amazon Kindle app I knew there was one particular book I needed to download to both devices immediately. It's a reference book that I wanted to make sure that I had on my device as the weekend began. But when I opened the app it only showed me a small subset of my books. "What?" I wondered. I went into that digital download portion of Amazon store and there I saw a list of all the books that I have purchased for my Kindle. "Great," I thought "I'll just choose the books that I want and click the ' download/send it to...' Button next to the item." I clicked and a few books gave back the message "successfully sent to". A number of the books, however, including the one I was looking for, gave back the message that they were unable to be sent to my iPhone. I tried to download it to my iPod touch and received the same message...

The customer rep asked me to send every one of the books in my Amazon library to my iPhone. Most of them gave the message that they were sent but a number of them returned the message "Cannot be sent to selected device".

"Oh that's the problem," he said "if some of the books will download and the others won't it means that you've reached the maximum number of times you can download the book."

I asked him what that meant since the books I needed to download weren't currently on any device because I had wiped those devices clean and simply wanted to reinstall. He proceeded to tell me that there is always a limit to the number of times you can download a given book. Sometimes, he said, it's five or six times but at other times it may only be once or twice. And, here's the kicker folks, once you reach the cap you need to repurchase the book if you want to download it again.

Kindle's DRM Rears Its Ugly Head... And It IS Ugly (via /., and thanks to everyone who suggested it!)

In his latest Wired column, Bruce Schneier explains why asking science fiction writers to come up with fanciful terrorism scenarios is dumb.

I discounted the exercise at the time, calling it "embarrassing." I never thought that 9/11 was a failure of imagination. I thought, and still think, that 9/11 was primarily a confluence of three things: the dual failure of centralized coordination and local control within the FBI, and some lucky breaks on the part of the attackers. More imagination leads to more movie-plot threats -- which contributes to overall fear and overestimation of the risks. And that doesn't help keep us safe at all...

Fascinating stuff. But the biases produce the reverse effect when it comes to movie-plot threats. The more you think about far-fetched terrorism possibilities, the more outlandish and scary they become, and the less control you think you have. This causes us to overestimate the risks.

Think about this in the context of terrorism. If you're asked to come up with threats, you'll think of the significant ones first. If you're pushed to find more, if you hire science-fiction writers to dream them up, you'll quickly get into the low-probability movie plot threats. But since they're the last ones generated, they're more available. (They're also more vivid -- science fiction writers are good at that -- which also leads us to overestimate their probability.) They also suggest we're even less in control of the situation than we believed. Spending too much time imagining disaster scenarios leads people to overestimate the risks of disaster.

How Science Fiction Writers Can Help, or Hurt, Homeland Security

After adding MIDI control via Arduino + DAC, MrBook cased up the added circuitry, creating a much needed wooden back panel in the process. The upgraded kit can be seen above getting along nicely with Ableton Live - good to see the lil' Gakken synth get the pro-style treatment. Check out his blog entry for info.


In the Maker Shed:


SX-150 Analog Synthesizer Kit

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In this shocking video from the Climate Camp protests at Kingsnorth Climate Camp, two people who ask cops who've illegally removed their badges to identify themselves are tackled, deliberately injured, and arrested. As is clear from the video, the police singled out anyone who photographed or monitored police activity at the protest, and used extreme, unprovoked force to prevent themselves from being identified as they committed crimes against the peaceful protestors.

Arrested for asking a policeman for his badge number

A US Department of Defense training manual describes protest as "low-level terrorism." This is part of a broader trend of state agencies characterizing protest as a form of terrorism.

The first question of the Terrorism Threat Factors, "Knowledge Check 1" section reads as follows:

Which of the following is an example of low-level terrorism activity?

Select the correct answer and then click Check Your Answer.

O Attacking the Pentagon
O IEDs
O Hate crimes against racial groups
O Protests

The "correct" answer is Protests.

DoD Training Manual: Protests are "Low-Level Terrorism (via Isen)

Here's John Hodgman doing a stellar job at the Radio and TV Correspondents' Dinner, addressing President Obama at the head table on the subject of being a true Nerd President. I was disappointed that Obama couldn't remember the name of the god that Conan worshipped. Of course, I was also disappointed that Obama decided to suppress videos and photos of illegal torture conducted by American troops.

John Hodgman at Radio & TV Correspondents' Dinner (via Kottke)

MojoKid writes "A new study by Harris Interactive notes that currently, one in ten Americans (10%) own an HD DVD player, while just 7% own a Blu-ray player. Crazy, right? More Americans own HD DVD right now than the "winning" format, Blu-ray. If you think about it, that statistic isn't that shocking. When HD DVD was around, it was far and away the "budget" format for high-def. The players were cheaper, the films were cheaper. In other words, it was a format more ready to thrive in a down economy. Blu-ray was always viewed as a niche format for those absorbed in A/V, not the common man's format. The survey also found that on average, consumers purchased approximately 6 Standard Format DVD's in the last six months compared with 1 in HD format."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

• A batch of ancient employee gifts and promo items from supercomputer legend Cray hit eBay.

• The Viliv S5 is a well-made pocket PC stuck with the same old software.

• Pocket hard drives galore: Rob reviewed a droppable one from Iomega, while Seagate bumped its biggest to 640GB and Samsung went completely mad.

• T-Mobile's myTouch, its second Android phone, is coming to America.

• Do you approve of unsourced stories on Steve Jobs' health?

• Alex E.2 made a cute security droid, a la Portal.

• You can do your own Ioning with an Nvidia-toting Atom motherboard from Japan.

• The so-called Fire Bell Alarm Clock turned out to have a feeble beeper.

• Remember the traveler who recorded his TSA tormentors with an iPhone? He's suing them.

• An aluminum pencil sated our productivity fetish.

• Apple put up a chart explaining what iPhone 3.0 features work on each handset.

• A fellow put a lovely, tiny garden in a broken camera lens.

Theo Jansen's idea for the Strandbeest was that they would be "autonomous," driven by the wind. Here's a solar-powered version.

Walking robot / plant thing

More:

• Theo Jansen-inspired Arduino walker
• Interview with Theo Jansen...

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As a whole bunch of you have sent in, the musician Moby has put up a blog post where he suggests the RIAA should be disbanded for its $1.92 million win over Jammie Thomas. While (unfortunately) he gets a few of the facts wrong (they didn't sue her for $2 million, but it's what the jury chose -- though it is accurate that the RIAA has clearly suggested it has no problem with the statutory rates for infringement in the past), his overall point is sound. It's ridiculous that the RIAA thinks this is the proper strategy:

argh. what utter nonsense. this is how the record companies want to protect themselves? suing suburban moms for listening to music? charging $80,000 per song?

punishing people for listening to music is exactly the wrong way to protect the music business. maybe the record companies have adopted the 'it's better to be feared than respected' approach to dealing with music fans. i don't know, but 'it's better to be feared than respected' doesn't seem like such a sustainable business model when it comes to consumer choice. how about a new model of 'it's better to be loved for helping artists make good records and giving consumers great records at reasonable prices'?

i'm so sorry that any music fan anywhere is ever made to feel bad for making the effort to listen to music.

the riaa needs to be disbanded.

This isn't new territory for Moby. Way back in 2003, he got angry after finding out that some of his songs were being used by the RIAA to sue people, and stated: "I'm tempted to go onto Kazaa and download some of my own music, just to see if the RIAA would sue me for having mp3's of my own songs on my hard-drive."

Still, we're seeing more and more artists react poorly to the RIAA, who still claims to represent them. Why is it that our politicians still buy that clearly incorrect story?

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Should you find yourself in want of a classic Moog Synthesizer but a little short on funds, consider anait's paper version - much more portable than the original!

More:

Precisely rendered paper synth

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An anonymous reader writes "The Wall Street Journal has an article about Nokia and Siemens selling the censoring technology to Iran's government. Do you believe that the public relation damage to these companies can persuade them from selling this kind of technology to other dictatorial regimes?" I don't believe there will *be* any PR Damage, and that makes me a little sad.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Lucky, of Pizza Crusade, writes:

I saw your post on Tyvek sails, and immediately thought of the PDRacer (Puddle Duck Racer) - a little sailboat you can build for about $150 with tools most people already have. There's a ton of info out there, as well as info so you can get involved with a local group of PDRacers - or start your own group. I haven't built one yet, but can't wait to try my hand at it.

When I was a young teen, my dad had a 37' cabin cruiser for a while and I had a dinghy sailboat about this size (plastic). I loved that thing. This brings back fond memories.

PDRacer

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FinalAnkleHealer sends along an IBTimes article proposing that $500 ultra-thin laptops, capable of multitasking and editing multimedia content, could be the next market contested by Intel and AMD. "AMD partnered with Hewlett-Packard Co. in January to launch the Pavilion dv2. Intel launched its rival CULV (Consumer Ultra Low Voltage) chip this month and Acer Inc. and Asustek Computer Inc were among those that demonstrated laptops based on the new technology at the Computex trade show in Taipei. ... With more people gravitating toward mobile and wireless technology, consumers want smaller laptops — and most of those people would prefer doing more than surfing the Web, which the no-frills netbooks now excel at. ... Acer, the first company to introduce a cheap Intel-powered CULV laptop, expects revenue from that segment to account for 15 percent of its total sales by the end of 2009. Asustek, which pioneered the netbook in 2007, plans to launch five consumer-priced ultra-thins this year."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Dave Fowler, of uC Hobby, sent us a link to this java app for determining resistor code values. There are a lot of these resistor ID tools floating around, in different formats -- it's nice to have the option to use which one works best for you and your circumstances (for instance, I don't have a computer at my workbench, so it's easiest for me to just use my DMM or one of those paper dial IDers I got from Radio Shack several decades ago). But YMMV.

Online Resistor Color Code Tool

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It's now possible to run Nintendo emulation without 'classic' emulator on Palm WebOS. In just ten easy steps, provided by the kind folks at pre web wiki, you, too, could be shooting up the baddies in the Central American jungles of Contra.

NES emulator on WebOS [via CruchGear]

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Last week, we noted that Germany may be following Australia down the very slippery slope of internet censorship with a secret blacklist of websites that ISPs must block. Not surprisingly, not all politicians in Germany support such a move, and one, Jorg Tauss, was apparently so upset by it, that he's left his own political party and signed on with the German Pirate Party instead, recognizing that being against such forms of censorship is a key plank of the party's platform. That said, the article notes that Tauss may not exactly be what the party is looking for, as he's under a cloud of speculation concerning a supposed investigation into child porn on his computer. He claims that the content was sent to him while he was investigating such content in his role as an elected official, but it could still raise questions, and pending the outcome of the investigation could potentially harm the Pirate Party's reputation if the story is different than his official one.

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UltraOne writes "Sprint requires your Social Security number in order to run a credit check before they will allow you to open an account, according to a store manager in Silver Spring, MD. Since Sprint is the exclusive carrier for the Palm Pre, if you are not willing to provide an SSN, you can't buy this product. I believe a full credit check for this level of consumer purchase is a clear example of overkill. I have supplied an SSN when buying a house and renting an apartment, but never for any other consumer purchase. I have purchased my cars with cash so far, so I don't have first-hand experience, but a car loan also seems to be an appropriate place to require an SSN for a credit check. At the very least, Sprint should have an alternative for people who don't want to give out their SSN. I also found the entire experience a powerful argument against exclusive license agreements." Read below for details of this reader's experience.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I really like this light switch floor lamp by ED Vining. It's beautifully carved and finished. I wonder how much it weighs? If anyone has more information about his sculptures, please leave it in the comments below. Thanks!

There isn't much more info on YouTube about this work, but you can see another wood carving videos by Ed Vining here.

In the Maker Shed:


Woodworkers Pocket Ref

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Last week, we were among a bunch of blogs and news organizations who questioned the fact that the city of Bozeman, Montana was making job applicants hand over not just info on their social networking activities, but usernames and passwords to all accounts. This certainly got a lot of attention, and, not surprisingly it's caused the city to drop the requirement and to say that it had made a mistake (found via Slashdot). Still, it makes you wonder why it took a press onslaught for the city to recognize the potential problems with such a privacy violation.

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theodp writes "When questioned about his firm's US hiring, Information Week reports that Vineet Nayar, the CEO of the Indian outsourcing giant HCL Technologies, showed he can stereotype with the best of them, telling an audience in NYC that most American tech grads are 'unemployable'. Explaining that Americans are far less willing than students from developing economies like India, China, and Brazil to master the 'boring' details of tech process and methodology, the HCL chief added that most Americans are just too expensive to train. HCL, which was reportedly awarded a secretive $170 million outsourcing contract by Microsoft last April, gets a personal thumbs-up from Steve Ballmer for 'walking the extra mile.' Ballmer was busy last week pitching more H-1B visas as the cure for America's job ills at The National Summit."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Panasonic has released firmware updates for its Lumix DMC-GH1 and DMC-G1 Micro four thirds cameras and the Lumix G Vario HD 14-140mm F4.0-5.8 ASPH. MEGA O.I.S. lens. Firmware v1.1 for the GH1 makes a series of performance improvements, while v1.3 for the G1 improves compatibility with the 14-140mm lens. v1.1 for the HD lens improves image stabilization while shooting videos and improves camera compatibility.

[Photo from Uncle Ray]

Long before my time, my grandfather Raymond Albert Sheffield, was messing about with cars. When I was about 10 or 11, we sat on a beach on Martha's Vineyard watching the ferries come and go exchanging cars and passengers while he told me of the car that he had built in his younger days.

Apparently, not having enough money for a vehicle was not going to stop him, so he built his own version of what I recall was a Model A. Where the model name would have been embossed, he put his own name. During the winters, he needed to get his ride off the street, so he and his mates dismantled the vehicle so that it could be carried down the stairs to the basement of the house he and my grandmother lived in. I imagine that he spent the winter modding and tuning the components for a better vehicle in the following year's driving season. In several of the pictures here, you can see the gleeful pride he had in owning and driving the vehicle that he made with his own hands. In in this one you can see the excitement he had of driving his project.

My uncle Ray inherited the task of dealing with the room full of photos (no kidding!) after my grandfather passed on. He has since scanned and archived the decades of black and white photos that my grandfather shot, developed and printed in a darkroom located in his office.

My grandfather went on to become something of an inventor, tinkerer, and maker. Some time in the 1970's, I recall being at his Cambridge workshop, Air Conditioning Engineering, and seeing all the metallic creations he was cooking up with the help of his staff. One that I recall was a tubed fireplace contraption that drew the cool air from below the fire and expelled warm air out the top of the tubes, increasing the efficiency of the average wood burning fireplace.

Much of my grandfather's life's work seemed to track back to the creation of his car, the RayBiltIt, and the practical joy of a useful project. We should all do what we can to cultivate this kind of competent pursuit of dreams in the young people around us. Who knows what can come of such interests? New inventions, new technologies, new solutions to the world's problems, or maybe just some good wholesome fun with innovation?

If you have a father in your life who has nurtured your making spirit, you can share some stories with us in the comments, and if you are still hunting for the perfect gift, he may enjoy a discounted subscription to MAKE magazine.

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JustShootMe writes "I have a question for my fellow Slashdotters, and yes, I realize I am entering the lion's den covered in tasty meat-flavored sauce. I have never been a very social person, preferring to throw myself into technology; therefore, I've been spectacularly unsuccessful in developing any meaningful interpersonal relationships. Lately I have begun to feel that this situation is not tenable, and I would like to fix it. But I really don't know how and haven't the faintest idea where to start. I know that I am in the minority and that there are many different kinds of Slashdot readers, most of whom have more experience in this realm than I do. So please tell me: how, and more importantly, where do you meet fellow geeks — preferably including some of the opposite gender — in meatspace?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

WARNING: GRAPHIC VIDEO / DEPICTS DEATH.

Via Andrew Sullivan, who is doing some of the best coverage of the Iran story online:

"At 19:05 June 20th Place: Karekar Ave., at the corner crossing Khosravi St. and Salehi st. A young woman who was standing aside with her father watching the protests was shot by a basij member hiding on the rooftop of a civilian house. He had clear shot at the girl and could not miss her. However, he aimed straight her heart.

I am a doctor, so I rushed to try to save her. But the impact of the gunshot was so fierce that the bullet had blasted inside the victim's chest, and she died in less than 2 minutes. The protests were going on about 1 kilometers away in the main street and some of the protesting crowd were running from tear gass used among them, towards Salehi St.

The film is shot by my friend who was standing beside me. Please let the world know."

Confirming The Basij Murder Of Neda (Daily Dish)

There is another video of the same scene, taken from a different angle, here.

Boing Boing reader S.R. Hadden explains in the discussion thread below that an unidentified man kneeling next to her

...is crying out, in Farsi: "My Neda, don't be afraid, please don't go, please don't go, please stay..."

Related: 'Neda' becomes rallying cry for Iranian protests

An anonymous reader points out a column by James Boyle, who knows a thing or two about copyright, analyzing the Obama Administration's policy choices about intellectual property and high tech. "Traditionally, Democratic administrations take their copyright policy direct from Hollywood and the recording industry. Unfortunately, so do Republican administrations. The capture of regulators by the industry they regulate is nothing new, of course, but in intellectual property there is the added benefit that incumbents can frequently squelch competing technologies and business methods before they ever come into existence. ... The Obama administration's warm embrace of Silicon Valley, and Silicon Valley's checkbook, had given some hope that this pattern would change — and I think it will. Now, instead of taking copyright policy direct from the media conglomerates (who, after all, have a very legitimate point of view — even if not the only point of view) it is quite likely that the administration will construct it as a contract between content companies and high-technology companies such as Google. In some places, citizens and consumers will probably benefit, simply because optimizing for the interests of two economic blocs rather than one is likely to give us a slightly more balanced, and less technology-phobic, set of rules. And perhaps the administration will go further. But recent actions make me doubt that this is the case."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Joshua Foer is a guest blogger on Boing Boing. Joshua is a freelance science journalist and the co-founder of the Atlas Obscura: A Compendium of the World's Wonders, Curiosities, and Esoterica, with Dylan Thuras.

Last summer, I read Roberto Casati's wonderful, lyrical book Shadows: Unlocking their Secrets, from Plato to Our Time, and was struck by a passage in which Casati describes how his addiction to total solar eclipses (TSEs) has carried him to the middle of the Black Sea and to Zambia:

A total eclipse is by far the most impressive natural phenomenon that we terrestrials can witness. The staging doesn't lessen its brutal effects. The temperature drops. A mysterious cold wind starts blowing. The shadow comes running up like a hurricane on the sea. The light collapses, and in just a few seconds, a metallic night falls--it comes on so fast the mind is not ready for it. On the horizon, unreachably far away, are the vestiges of daytime: an orangy twilight all around, as if a set designer made a mistake in projecting a sunset. In the midst of all this is a sun that's no longer a furnace but just an unlucky rock: its shining fringe is like the silver mane of hair of some aged celestial divinity; and stars glitter again, caught out of place in this out-of-joint nighttime.

Sounds like an almost religious experience, doesn't it?

TSEs happen about once every other year, and are only visible in a narrow band of the earth's surface. When I first read Casati's book, I vowed that I would try to see one as soon as possible.

I had high hopes of being in the Siberian town of Nadym for the last TSE, on August 1, 2008, but another commitment kept me in another hemisphere. Alas, I'm also going to be glued to my desk for the next TSE, which is exactly a month away, on July 22. Since it's going to pass over major populated areas in India and China, it may end up being witnessed by more human beings than any other TSE in history. It's also going to be the longest of the 21st century, lasting 6 minutes and 39 seconds at its point of maximum eclipse.

The next four TSEs--in 2010, 2012, 2015, and 2016--will barely cross dry land. So unless you want to join a cruise expedition or do some airborne eclipse chasing, you'll have to wait for the 2017 eclipse, which is going to carve a big fat path across the American heartland. For more info, check out Totality: The Digital Magazine for Eclipse Chasers.

If you hang around makers long enough, especially older ones, sooner or later somebody will mention Dave Gingery. And then everybody within earshot will either A) genuflect or B) look around in confusion at all the people who are genuflecting. For those in the latter category, here's an explanation I wrote for Supernaturale awhile back:

Some people are better with tools than others. Like most human attributes, there's a normal distribution of this talent, with a few exceptionally handy-capped people, a few übermechaniker, and most of the rest of us somewhere in between. The late, great Dave Gingery definitely belongs in the "über" category. His classic 6-book series, available for decades now through Lindsay Technical Books, begins with instruction about how to build a home blast furnace and sand table so you can melt scrap metal and cast your own metal parts from wooden patterns. The remaining six books go on to describe how to use these castings to make your own lathe, metal shaper, milling machine, drill press, and indexing head. The order is important, because each tool requires the use of the previous machines in its construction. While the project seems a bit ambitious for me given my available time, I keep a set of the books around on the off-chance I'll be solely responsible for rebuilding industrial society in some sort of post-apocalyptic scenario.

Dave, sadly, left us in 2004. Personally, I think there should be a formal day of remembrance among makers. Meanwhile, Dave's son Vince is carrying the torch and has published a healthy oeuvre of DIY books himself. The works of both father and son are available through Lindsay Technical Books.

Look Inside >>  Volume 04

More:

• Ann Arbor aluminum casting demo
• How-To: Making glass with a grill and vacuum cleaner
• Homemade lathe...from a lawnmower
• Homemade metal spinning lathe

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