Here's robot-maker Mario Caicedo Langer's "Barbie Strogg" robot.

snydeq writes to recommend Peter Wayner's inside look at the frustration iPhone developers face from Apple when attempting to distribute their apps through the iPhone App Store. Wayner's long piece is an extended analogy comparing Apple to the worst of Soviet-era bureaucracy. "Determined simply to dump an HTML version of his book into UIWebView and offer two versions through the App Store, Wayner endures four months of inexplicable silences, mixed messages, and almost whimsical rejections from Apple — the kind of frustration and uncertainty Wayner believes is fast transforming Apple's regulated marketplace into a hotbed of bottom-feeding mediocrity. 'Developers are afraid to risk serious development time on the platform as long as anonymous gatekeepers are able to delay projects by weeks and months with some seemingly random flick of a finger,' Wayner writes of his experience. 'It's one thing to delay a homebrew project like mine, but it's another thing to shut down a team of developers burning real cash. Apple should be worried when real programmers shrug off the rejections by saying, "It's just a hobby."'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The lottery has often been described as a "tax on those who don't understand probability." However, it seems some enterprising folks are trying to use that basic fact to help people who have trouble saving money (who often overlap with the folks who don't understand probability) to save more. Apparently some credit unions in Michigan are experimenting with a lottery feature as a part of a savings account:

Psychologists have long known that people tend to overestimate the odds of rare events. Applying that behavioral insight, finance professor Peter Tufano of Harvard Business School has devised a clever program called "Save to Win." Launched earlier this year for members of eight credit unions in Michigan, it is a cross between a certificate of deposit and a raffle ticket. Members who put $25 or more into a Save to Win one-year CD are entered into a monthly "savings raffle" for prizes up to $400, plus one annual drawing for a $100,000 jackpot.

Apparently, this program has attracted $3.1 million in new deposits, many (the article claims) from people who have never been able to save much money. In many ways it is like buying a lottery ticket, except that you don't lose the money paid for the ticket. The credit unions make this work by paying out a slightly lower interest rate on the CD in question, but the net effect works out to benefit everyone. Many who put their money into such an account would never have put their money into a higher rate CD in the first place. In some ways, it's a neat example of efficient price discrimination that expands an overall market.

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alphadogg sends in a Network World piece on the unexpectedly effective technologies Iran is now employing to thwart their citizens' access to the Net. "While the government's initial efforts to censor the Internet were blunt and often ineffective, it has started employing more sophisticated tools to thwart dissidents' attempts to communicate with each other and the outside world. Iranian dissidents are not alone in their struggle, however, as several sympathetic hacker groups have been working to keep them online. One such group is NedaNet, whose mission is to 'help the Iranian people by setting up networks of proxy severs, anonymizers, and any other appropriate technologies that can enable them to communicate and organize.' NedaNet project coordinator Morgan Sennhauser, who has just written a paper detailing the Iranian government's latest efforts to thwart hackers (PDF), says that the government's actions have been surprisingly robust and have challenged hackers in ways that the Chinese government's efforts at censorship have not."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

What happened to the original Apollo tapes, variously said to be wiped, lost, or freshly rediscovered? Lisa Katayama interviews NASA flight engineer Dick Nafzger to find out. The case against iPhone in the bedroom: three rules to live (and swipe) by. The most famous photo from the Apollo Moon landing has a story of its own. And don't miss Steven Leckart's interview with engineer, rapper and heart-breaking realist Buzz Aldrin.

Above is a table with some GMC-4s on it and some Gakken analog synth kits. Below that is Francesco Fondi (right) talking to Kaneko San, the editor of the Gakken's Otona no Kagaku magazine. (More pics of the evening, including several of the NEC TK-80, after the jump.)

Our pal Francesco Fondi, of Modellismo Hobby Media, was in Tokyo a few weeks ago. On July 5, he attended Tokyo Culture Club's Mycon Night. The event was organized to celebrate the recent release of the 24th volume of Gakken's Otona no Kagaku magazine, which features the very first 4-bit microcomputer kit to be produced in the last 25 years: the GMC-4.

Fra writes:

The GMC4 has a 16-key keyboard, a build-in speaker, a 7-segment LED display, and a 6 LED display. A tennis game, music software, and two other 4-bit games come pre-installed in the GMC-4.

While drinking some great Kirin beer with friends from Sansai Books and Gizmodo Japan, I listened to the introduction speech by the Gakken editors. The inspiration for the GMC-4 comes from the TK-80, released by NEC in 1976, and partially, from the FX MYCON R-165, which Gakken released in 1983.

Several people in the room had the GMC-4 with them, so the speaker started to read some code and help everyone with a GMC-4 to program it "live." Then they introduced the Arduino, and being Italian, I was really happy to see how a board "Made in Italy" is so well received by Japanese engineers and toy hackers!

With the presentation finished, it was time for my friends Polymoog and Gan to play live with a special setup of three GMC-4s patched into Gakken SX150 analog synths. Gan is the guy who designed the SX150, and once in a year, with Abe, he organizes the Analog Synthesizer Builders' Summit Party in Tokyo.

The event concluded around 9:30 pm with another live act, but by then, I'd had too many beers and too much deep discussions about Gakken gadgets with Musahsi from Gizmodo.jp to remember the artists' names who sat in with Polymoog.

In the end, it was by far the geekiest event held in Tokyo in the last few months, even geekier than Danny Choo's CGM nights (sorry Danny)!!

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One of the more interesting trends in the music world is the “return” of the vinyl LP. While sales of CD’s continue to fall in the face of digital downloads, vinyl LP sales continue to rise:

Consumers purchased 1.88 million new vinyl LPs in 2008, an 89 percent increase over 2007 and the highest sales volume recorded in the 17-year history of Nielsen SoundScan. Further, in good news for some physical retailers, two out of three vinyls LPs were purchased at independent record stores.

There are a number of reasons for this, but the most obvious is that the LP is a tangible object that can’t be easily reproduced and can only be shared through a physical, real-world exchange. For true fans, the LP is a sort of badge of fandom, proof of just how much you love the band. Compared to a digital download or a CD, the LP is a crafted thing, complete with large-scale artwork and often other inserts.

While it isn’t likely that LP sales will eclipse digital downloads anytime soon, it is also highly unlikely that the LP market will be undercut by piracy.

Could these same factors be a forecaster for the future of printed books and newspapers? It is hard to imagine that these items, so easily digitized, will be able to maintain their current position on top of the mountain and we are already seeing the rapid decline of the newspaper business.

In the cases of both newspapers and books, it might be that their only hope in surviving over the long-term is to invest in elements that can truly not be pirated. As Dave Eggers points out in a recent Salon interview:

I think newspapers shouldn’t try to compete directly with the Web, and should do what they can do better, which may be long-form journalism and using photos and art, and making connections with large-form graphics and really enhancing the tactile experience of paper. You know, including a full-color comic section, for example, which of course was standard in newspapers years ago, when you’d have a full broadsheet Winsor McCay comic. So we’ll have a big, full-color comic section, and we’re also trying to emphasize what younger readers are looking for, what directly appeals to them.

Now, I am not saying that comics section will save newspapers, but the point is to make the object something desirable to possess in physical form.

For the moment, we are going to see traditional publishers fight futilely to maintain the status quo but the ground is quickly falling away beneath them and it is going to take some innovative thinking about the value of printed matter to keep them in the game.

Crossposted from My Media Musings

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

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1sockchuck writes "A Texas startup called Baryonyx plans to build data centers powered entirely by renewable energy. Its first project will be a wind-powered server farm powered by 100 wind turbines in the Texas panhandle. The company has also leased 38,000 acres in the Gulf of Mexico, where it hopes to build hundreds of 300-foot wind turbines that can each generate up to 5 megawatts of power to support additional facilities. Baryonyx plans to sell excess capacity to the local utility, which it will use as a backup when the wind dies down."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Now, this is nice and insane. So, apparently HSBC has "bought" the normally-public Madison Square Park in New York for today, and to make sure everyone knows it, by just setting foot in the park today is the equivalent of clicking the "I agree" box on something you'd probably never agree to. This Awl article has details. And what exactly is HSBC advertising? HSBC seems like one of those companies you end up doing business with because you have to-- does anyone seek out HSBC products? How would one even try to be excited about them?

I did a parody of these agreements for Carrie's Illegal Art exhibit; it looks like reality's hell bent on catching up. I'm sure in a couple of years, after Mountain Dew owns the now fluorescent-yellow moon, we'll be used to these kinds of things popping up everywhere.

Jason Torchinsky is a guest blogger on Boing Boing. Jason has a book out now, Ad Nauseam: A Survivor's Guide to American Consumer Culture, that he hopes you'll want to buy. He lives in Los Angeles, where he is a tinkerer and artist, started a webcasting company, and writes for the Onion News Network. He lives with a common-law wife, five animals, too many old cars, and a shed full of crap.

Guestblogger Marina Gorbis is executive director at Institute for the Future.

Thank you so much for allowing me to engage you in a conversation. Our signature process at the Institute for the Future is what we call "Foresight to Insight to Action." We don't predict the future, because nobody can do that. Rather, we create provocative but realistic visions of the future. We use those forecasts to engage people in conversations about what this particular future might mean to them and to their organizations, what is important, what they need to pay attention to, what challenges they might be facing. Those are the insights that they can then use to develop action steps to achieve a desirable future.

Your generous comments were full of insights that I found really interesting and helpful. Here is what I learned from you in response to posting Socialstructing, Dead Souls on Social Media, Socialstructing: Statement of Social Currency, and Dushechka:

• Socialstructing -- organizing around social relations and not against them -- has the potential to humanize our economy. At the same time, substituting social capital for money as the new currency can bring in new challenges and new social divisions. We can end up with whole new classes of rich and poor based on new social capital metrics.

• Social networks can be exclusionary (secret societies, clubs, cliques), again something to watch for.

• The drive for accumulation may be as harmful with regard to social capital as it is with regard to money. People may engage in all kinds of unsavory practices to build up social capital (just as they do with financial capital).

• Any single metric of a person's reputation is bound to create a crooked mirror of someone's worth. Humans are too complex to be reduced to one measurable metric. What isn't the metric measuring? What perverse incentives for accumulation it is creating?

• Finally, and most importantly, as my son leaves for college, I need to watch out lest I develop new passions much less savory than bluegrass and baseball (thank you, @samuraizenu).

I want to leave you with one of my favorite short clips from an exercise IFTF did at the 2008 Maker Faire Bay Area. As visitors passed our booth, we asked them to record 30 second videos outlining their visions of the future. Great wisdom from the mouth of the babe, completely spontaneously.

Make a Better Future!

Such a showoff, that Oleg Sharov. (Via Filled With Chocolate Pudding)

alphadogg writes with an excerpt from Network World that might save you some money: "Imagine downloading a two-hour HD movie in three minutes to your new cell phone, then plugging the phone into your TV to watch the film. Make unlimited phone calls, surf online as much as you like and send unlimited text messaging for $70 a month, without a contract. Sign up to sell the same service to other people and get $10 a month for each person you sell to. That's what a group of related companies including Zer01 Mobile, Buzzirk, Global Verge and Unified Technologies Group are promoting heavily online and at industry trade shows. The offer is attractive enough to garner coverage in top business and technology publications, at least one positive review from an analyst and even a 'best in show' award from a magazine at the CTIA wireless industry trade show earlier this year. Does it all sound too good to be true? If so, that's because it probably is. What little information is available about the services is technically inconsistent, and doesn't match up with public records."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

On Friday I asked if anyone knew where Bill Barker, creator of the stupendous Schwa art project, was.

Today Bill (he goes by William now) emailed me and called my friend and bOING bOING senior editor Gareth Branwyn.

In short, he's doing fine and has a new book and website coming out! Here are the details.

One of the annoying things about many in the entertainment industry who want to change the laws and the technology on the internet is that they've shown up late to the party. The internet was originally created as a communications medium, rather than a content one. And, for many years, it worked just fine -- and whatever "content" that was on the web was a part of the communications effort. It's only in the last decade or so (even less for some parts) that the old entertainment industry jumped online with its broadcast media mindset. But, rather than learning to understand and respect the fact that it's a communication medium, where things like sharing content aren't just possible, but the norm and an absolute "good thing," they simply insisted that something must be broken, and that it needed to be fixed.

They looked on the internet not for what it was (and is), but what they wanted it to be. To them, it was just a slightly more interactive version of what they had always done -- and they assumed that everyone would bow down to their wishes, because, obviously, everyone just wants that mass market content.

No statement encapsulates that more than the following, spoken by one Anthony Healy, director of the Australasian Performing Right Association, discussing the various proposals for new copyright laws in New Zealand, where he somehow states with a straight face:

"Without the content industries, the internet would be empty."

Oh really? Why not try it, and let's see. The quote, by the way, was brought to us by Andrew Dubber, who properly calls Healey the "Wrongest Man on the Internet, July 2009." However, this really is how some of these guys think. They don't think that the internet really existed before they discovered it, and they think that everyone logs onto YouTube just to catch the latest TV clips. They don't realize that people use it to communicate and share and collaborate -- and that's a lot more useful than using it to get fed some mass market entertainment junk.

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DavidMatuszek writes "I will be teaching Java again this Fall. Students work in pairs, but unfortunately (after the first hour) typically not physically together. I would like to find collaborative software that is (1) dead simple to use, because that's not what the course is about, and (2) free. Google Docs would do, but students will be sharing code — plain text — not RTF or HTML or Word files. Is there such software for plain text?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

And with this "Curiously Strong Trebuchet" I think we've reached some sort of unholy singularity where everything that can possible go in or on a mint tin has done so. Now I think we're all going to die.

The Curiously Strong Trebuchet: A Pocket Sized Medieval Siege Engine

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We have a mail list for the back channel at InBerkeley.com, and from time to time a question comes up that requires research. If the question is interesting, my first impulse is: Write It Up!

Now, this is the result of 12-plus years as a blogger. I know my community loves interesting questions, and we have an informal approach on Scripting News that I'd like to port to InBerkeley.com.

So, in that spirit -- here's a question posed by my colleague Mark Haas.

Do Berkeley's infamous speed bumps, traffic diverters and other traffic-related policies, like politically-motivated, too-low speed limits raise the city's carbon footprint?

We just need a qualified author. Anyone know any traffic engineers, or perhaps someone at the UC Berkeley Institute for Transportation Studies? Other experts?

An anonymous reader writes "Linux distributions track upstream projects, releasing a particular version with each official release. But how far behind the latest versions do these releases linger? Scott Shawcroft did an interesting new study into this relationship between distributions and upstream projects. Shawcroft says: 'Over the last 10 months I've been working on Linux evolution research. Similar to distrowatch, I track the current versions of packages in a number of distributions and the current upstream version. Based on that data I then graph a number of metrics to understand the relationship between upstream and downstream.' His presentation on the topic scheduled for [this] week's open source convention, OSCON, should provide an interesting insight into that relationship. Currently he is tracking 20 projects including the Linux kernel, Firefox, GCC, OpenSSH and GNOME on Arch, Debian, Fedora, Gentoo, openSUSE, Sabayon, Slackware, and Ubuntu."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In the twice-monthly Make: Online Toolbox, we focus mainly 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, or refurbish.

---

This week, as part of "Teach Your Family to Solder Week," we look at what you need to get started in soldering. We already did a Toolbox column on soldering stations and stands, a staple for more serious soldering. Like anything else, once you get into it, there are all sorts of higher-end products you can invest in. But for starters, here are the bare basics you'll need. On Wednesday, I'll do a second installment of the column with more specialty tools you can add to make your soldering experience that much better.

I struggled with soldering for years because I was trying to do it with a super-cheap, low-wattage iron that came with a computer toolkit I got on sale. I finally broke down and bought a Xytronic model and was amazed at how much easier the soldering was and how much better my work looked. Mine second iron was similar to this model, sold by adafruit industries. Ladyada sells it for $22. It's a 30W, 110V temperature-adjustable iron. Well worth the money. I'm a big believer in early success when learning something new. The quicker you can get satisfying results and feel that sense of accomplishment, the more likely you are to keep going. In learning to solder, having an iron at least as good as this one will help you have a positive experience right from the start.

[For makers in other countries, adafruit also sell a 220V Euro-version of the same iron.]

Most irons come with a little metal stand that you rest your iron on. These are not trustworthy in the least and the iron is likely to end up in your lap. You need to get a spring-type stand that your iron securely slots into. Inside the large spring holder is a metal sleeve which protects you (and other flesh-covered entities) from getting burned. These stands also come with a sponge that you wet and wipe your iron on to keep it clean. You can get these stands at most electronics suppliers, online and off. The stand above is from adafruit and costs $6.

The spring holder holds your iron, but what holds the circuit boards you're going to be working on? This gadget, called a Panavise, in this case, the Panavise, Jr. Look on the desk of just about anybody doing serious electronics and you're likely to find one (or more) of these. Next to a Third Hand (see below), this is the most common jig for holding electronic components while you weld them all together. You can get these at most electronics suppliers. Ladyada sells hers for $28.

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Silke Hilsing created an imaginative interface to talk between the digital and analog world.

Virtual gravity is an interface between digital and analog world. With the aid of analog carriers, virtual terms can be taken up and transported from a loading screen to an analog scale. The importance and popularity of these terms (data base: Google Insights for Search), outputted as a virtual weight, can be weighed physically and compared. Therefore impalpable, digital data get an actual physical existence and become a sensually tangible experience.

The knowledge, that human beings also connect with a physical mass things like importance, power and influence allows the reverse that virtual things which are particularly asked and own a high popularity, would have to be heavier than others which attract less attention. Thereof results a virtual weight which can really affect the physical reality and becomes measurable and comparable.

You can read more about her project here.

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Over on Offworld, our Brandon's spotted step-by-step instructions for carving Mario mushrooms from radishes!

Someone at the Food Network is asleep at the wheel for not giving reigning bento champ Anna The Red her own games-related cooking show. The latest: this step by step tutorial to turn your ordinary radishes into Mario mushrooms, with the help of two bits of seaweed. [via Ian Bogost]

Cooking with Anna the Red: Mario mushrooms from regular radishes

Discuss this on Offworld

Jason Torchinsky is a guest blogger on Boing Boing. Jason has a book out now, Ad Nauseam: A Survivor's Guide to American Consumer Culture, that he hopes you'll want to buy. He lives in Los Angeles, where he is a tinkerer and artist, started a webcasting company, and writes for the Onion News Network. He lives with a common-law wife, five animals, too many old cars, and a shed full of crap.

A few years back I did some intense research into this. Lay down a dropcloth, because your mind is about to be blown.

Here's a pieced-together social and technical history of the Kremlin-White House hotline, a fascinating story of crypto, diplomacy and wicked hardware:

The method to be used was one-time tape. Section 4 of the annex to the memorandum stated: "The USSR shall provide for preparation and delivery of keying tapes to the terminal point of the link in the United States for reception of messages from the USSR. The United States shall provide for the preparation and delivery of keying tapes to the terminal point of the link in the USSR for reception of messages from the United States. Delivery of prepared keying tapes to the terminal points of the link shall be effected through the Embassy of the USSR in Washington (for the terminal of the link in the USSR) and through the Embassy of the United States in Moscow (for the terminal of the link in the United States).

For its one-time tape hardware, the US would employ the ETCRRM II, or Electronic Teleprinter Cryptographic Regenerative Repeater Mixer II. One of many 'one-time' tape mechanisms sold by commercial firms, it was produced and sold for about $1,000 by Standard Telefon Kabelfabrik of Oslo, the Norwegian subsidiary of International Telephone and Telegraph Corporation, the same company which installed the American terminal in the National Military Command Center deep within the Pentagon. It has four teleprinters -- two with English alphabet and two with Russian -- and four associated ETCRRM II's . In Moscow, the terminus was installed in the Kremlin, near the office of the Premier".

The Washington to London portion of the link was carried over the TAT-1 (Transatlantic No. 1), the first submarine transatlantic telephone cable system. It was laid between Gallanach Bay, near Oban, Scotland and Clarenville, Newfoundland between 1955 and 1956 and was inaugurated on September 25, 1956.

THE WASHINGTON-MOSCOW HOT LINE (via Beyond the Beyond)

Radley Balko wrote on his blog, The Agitator:

I’m trying to figure out how the photo for this NY Times scare story on distracted driving was taken. I can’t really conceive of a scenario where it wasn’t staged. Which means the caption is misleading. Also, who does this? I’ve never been in a car where the driver asked the passenger to hold the wheel so he could use both hands to send a text message. Does this actually happen?

It's a good question. What *did* the photographer talk about with the kids in the car?

UPDATE: PDN Pulse asked the photographer, Dan Gill, about the photo. He says he took it last year when the NYT assigned him to hang around with a group of teenagers. He didn't stage the photo, he says.

"In the course of doing the story in which I was hanging out with or shadowing three high school students I made the picture.

"I met them at their high school after classes and spent the evening with them. I told them I would be with them but to forget I was there. It did not take them long for them to forget I was there. We rode from school to one of their houses and down an inter belt highway. The driver was constantly texting 'his girls' throughout our travels. At one point on the eight-lane inter belt either the driver suggested his friend hold the wheel or his friend suggested it...and they did it.

"Were we safe? Probably not.... As journalists, we are not here to judge or to direct, but only to observe and tell the story."

griffjon writes "In an interview, Nicholas Negroponte claims that the biggest mistake OLPC made was the revolutionary Red Hat-based Sugar desktop environment — instead, he says, they should have built Sugar as an application that ran on a 'vanilla' Linux OS. Some disagree."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

brothke writes "A recent search on Amazon for travel guides returned over 30,000 results. Most of these are standard travel guides to popular tourist destinations which advise the reader to go to the typical tourist sites. The Geek Atlas: 128 Places Where Science and Technology Come Alive is a radically different travel guide. Rather than recommending the usual trite destinations, which are often glorified souvenir stores, the book takes the reader to places that make science real and exciting, and hopefully those who exit such places are more knowledgeable than when they went in." Read on for the rest of Ben's review.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Thanks to Cynical-C blog for finding this video of Vladimir Nabokov answering questions about his novel Lolita on NBC's Close Up in the mid-1950s.

Here's Part 2.

Evolution Control Committee's awesome soundtrack is NSFW.

Jason Torchinsky is a guest blogger on Boing Boing. Jason has a book out now, Ad Nauseam: A Survivor's Guide to American Consumer Culture, that he hopes you'll want to buy. He lives in Los Angeles, where he is a tinkerer and artist, started a webcasting company, and writes for the Onion News Network. He lives with a common-law wife, five animals, too many old cars, and a shed full of crap.

As I'm sure you're all aware, today is the anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. I adore pretty much everything about manned space exploration, so to commemorate this hallowed date I'd like to share a fascinating piece of Apollo-era NASA history: the Bioastronautics Data Book. The Bioastronautics Data Book is a reference for people who design manned spacecraft. It's essentially an amazingly detailed description of the peculiarities of the particular cargo they're designing for: people. You see, as contents of a spaceship, people are probably some of the messiest, drippiest, most fragile, and out-gassingest things you can possibly imagine. Luckily, you don't have to imagine, as the researchers of this book break down every single thing a person can possibly ooze, excrete, pass, spit, fart, hack up, you name it.

It's absolutely fascinating. Ever wonder what's in a fart? It's all here. How about the tolerances of people to g-forces, or temperature, or vacuum?

Many of the charts are quite funny in their scientific detachment. The chart that basically describes all the ways you can be broken and crushed by large falls or crashes is called "Impact Experience." There's a chart labeled "Radiation Damage to Male Gonads."

It's easy to picture some harried, nervous, dead-eyed young intern that they've been using for these tests. There's cold exposure charts with "pain zone" clearly delineated, a carbon dioxide effects chart with 4 zones: No effect, minor perceptive changes, distracting discomfort, and dizziness, stupor, unconsciousness. Even seemingly simple tests like saliva generation have the faint hint of a sadist at the helm: to get more saliva, they mention using "Paraffin-activated" collection. It would have killed them to give out gum?

This book is fascinating from both a perspective of appreciating how truly daunting the task of making workable spaceships really was, and as an owner and operator of a human body, it's like finally finding the factory shop manual. Special thanks also goes out to T.Mike, who is my man in the field for finding good crap.

Techdirt's CwF + RtB

Time for a little experimenting from Techdirt... For years, we've been talking about various new business models in the digital era, and how they can work. More recently, we've seen a rapid increase in musicians who have figured this out (though, we're seeing it in a few other industries as well). Back in January, for a presentation that I did at the music industry event MidemNet about Trent Reznor's various experiments, I tried to simplify what he had done into a simple equation, and came up with
Connect with Fans (CwF) + Reason to Buy (RtB) = The Business Model

That simple formula has resonated incredibly well, to the point that I'm receiving emails daily about it specifically -- and not just in the music industry, but many other industries, asking how they can apply it themselves. Some complained that such a model only worked for "big" name acts like Reznor, so I later expanded the original presentation to include many other acts of varying levels of fame and success to show how it could work at many different levels. Most recently, I used those examples to show where I believed the overall music industry was heading.

But, it actually goes beyond just the music industry. In fact, I'd argue that these models apply to many different industries, including the media business. After doing all those presentations, some of us here at Floor64/Techdirt got to talking about ways that they could be applied to other industries -- and one thing led to another where we began to wonder why we didn't test them out ourselves. So, we looked at the various models and thought about what could we do along those lines. I certainly love the "tiered" models, where there are numerous options of increasing value that people can buy into, and we figured, why not test that out ourselves? It would be a fun experiment and a great learning experience. So... here we are introducing:
Techdirt's CwF + RtB

We had a lot of fun putting this together. There's quite a range of things on the list. Of course, everything you are used to here on Techdirt remains as free and open as ever. Then there are all sorts of relatively inexpensive extras you can buy, granting you some extra abilities, like the chance to see some Techdirt posts before everyone else, followed up by some fun products -- such as t-shirts and a package that includes both a t-shirt and a book written by me. Like hoodies? We've got those too.

Beyond that, however, is where we really started to explore the possibilities. We realized we also wanted to use it to help promote others who understood this vision (it's not just about us, of course). So we put together two great offerings that I'm incredibly excited about. The first is our Techdirt Music Club offering, that doesn't just promote four musicians (Jill Sobule, Amanda Palmer, Moto Boy and Joe Pug) -- all of whom we've discussed at times for the cool things they do with new business models -- but also offers you something unique that you can't get anywhere else. All four (and their management) have been a tremendous joy to work with through this process. It's great brainstorming with creative, positive people.

Next is the Techdirt Book Club, which is a fantastic collection of must read books from a bunch of authors whose thinking on this is far beyond what else you might find out there. Even better? All of the authors involved -- William Patry, James Boyle, David Levine, Michele Boldrin and Michael Heller -- are so enthusiastic about this experiment that they've agreed to provide signed copies of the books in question. It's the ultimate signed book collection -- and, as a bonus we throw in additional features for Techdirt and the book that we put together from my writings -- which I'll sign as well.

From there we've also got a chance to hang out -- and spend the day with us and some friends. See the magic that is writing a Techdirt post and (much more exciting) have some entertaining discussions myself and with much more interesting folks like Mark Fletcher, Andy Kessler, Rich Skrenta and Eric Goldman. We'll have some meals, we'll hang out at the office, and we'll go out and have some fun as well. Should be a blast.

Above that level, we have a whole series of options that are more for the corporate level -- though, if you're feeling flush, individuals are more than welcome to take part, utilizing the business side of what we do here at Floor64/Techdirt. You've got a variety of different options that include some opportunities to use the Insight Community to get some smart analysis on your business model. Or you can help pick a theme for a week on Techdirt, complete with an Insight Community case and additional posts. There are also offerings where I'll speak at your company or event... all the way up to a full on Techdirt Greenhouse production for your company, both of which include cases with the Insight Community. And, if you really want to dig in, and get every single thing that we have offered... that's available as well.

And, of course, these offerings are targeted at the folks who like what we do, enjoy it and would like to interact with us some more... but we like to offer up things for everyone, including those who aren't huge fans, and would rather we shut up and go away. We've even got a package for you! Though, I warn you, it's a bit pricey. We may be offering something for you, but we never said we'd make it easy for you.

Anyway, we hope you have some fun checking these out -- and find something worthwhile to you. We enjoyed getting the whole thing together, and we're curious to see what we learn from this experiment. Special thanks to the team at Floor64 for putting in some crazy hours before this launch, and to everyone else (authors and their publishers, musicians and their managers, entrepreneurs, etc.) who agreed to take part in this experiment.

Techdirt's CwF + RtB

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Young Warriors is a new ad campaign for Mattel Asia Pacific's Matchbox brand. Created by Ogilvy & Mather Singapore, it depicts children in military scenes. Mother Jones' Dave Gilson suggests that the campaign is the sequel to last year's award-winning Young Drivers campaign for Matchbox by Ogilvy & Mather Frankfurt.

mjasay writes "Microsoft used to call the GPL 'anti-American.' Now, as Microsoft releases Hyper-V Linux Integration Components (LinuxIC) under the GPL (version 2), apparently Microsoft calls the GPL 'ally.' Of course, there was little chance the device drivers would be accepted into the Linux kernel base unless open source, but the news suggests a shift for Microsoft. It also reflects Microsoft's continued interest in undermining its virtualization competition through low prices, and may suggests concern that it must open up if it wants to fend off insurgent virtualization strategies from Red Hat (KVM), Novell (XEN), and others in the open-source camp. Microsoft said the move demonstrates its interest in using open source in three key areas: 1) Make its software development processes more efficient, 2) product evangelism, and 3) using open source to reduce marketing and sales costs or to try out new features that highlight parts of the platform customers haven't seen before."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It turns out the same dyes that work on computer parts also work on Lego bricks, which are also, in my experience, seemingly never available in the color you need. Lego purists generally frown on paints and adhesives, but frankly being an active builder can get pretty expensive pretty fast, and a lot of that is due to having to order elements you may already have in abundance, but in the wrong color. And sometimes the element you want may not even be manufactured in the color you need at all.

These pictures come from SaveTheAggie's post over on Classic-Castle.com, and show his own results in dying the armor on one of his Lego knights. His report also includes some abrasion tests of the dye's fastness.

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US law forbids private citizens from possessing any of the 842 pounds of moon rocks collected by astronauts and brought back to Earth.

Nevertheless, the allure of moon rocks is strong enough to have created a black market where moon rock fragments and dust are sold for astronomical prices.

One way to obtain a moon rock is by purchasing a plaque that the US government sometimes gives to famous people and to politicians from other countries. They contain tiny slivers of moon rock. Some of these gifts have drifted into the collectors' market. A 1998 CNN article, "Customs agents seize 4-billion-year-old moon rock," reported that a Florida man was arrested for trying to sell a "fingernail-sized moon rock, weighing barely more than a gram" for $5 million. The rock was originally given to the Honduran government in 1973 by then-President Richard Nixon:

Customs agents, postal inspectors and NASA launched "Operation Lunar Eclipse" in September with an advertisement in USA Today seeking moon rocks, officials said.

A Florida man identified as Alan Rosen called to offer a moon rock for sale. He told undercover agents he had bought the rock from the retired Honduran military officer, officials said. Agents viewed the rock at a suburban Miami bank and seized it on November 18, officials said.

Walter Cronkite got one of these plaques in 2004. Now that he is dead, I wonder where it will end up?

There's also an underground market in moon dust taken from dirty spacesuits. From a 1993 Omni article:

Upon the Apollo astronauts' return from each mission, NASA shipped the spacesuits to their manufacturer for inspection. According to unpublished accounts, workers sometimes ran loops of scotch tape across them, picking up small amounts of moon dust.

One of those moon-dust tapes, purportedly made off of an Apollo 14 lunar spacesuit, showed up in a for-sale newspaper ad early in 1992. A man named Steve Goodman had found the tape among the papers of his late father, whose company manufactured spacesuits. After consultation with Goodman and his lawyer, NASA decided it wasn't worth the effort--or the bad publicity--to confiscate the contraband moon-dust sample.

According to Antiques Roadshow, Christie's sold a moondust-on-tape sample for $300,000.

Also from Antiques Roadshow:

At a Superior Galleries sale in Beverly Hills in October 2000, one lucky collector named Florian Noller spotted a bag used to store artifacts collected on the moon that was taken from the Apollo 15 command module Endeavor. He bought the bag for $2,300. When Noller looked inside the bag, he found a previously unnoticed sprinkling of moon dust along its seams. He put scatterings of dust on little thumb-sized white cards and placed them on photos of astronaut James Irwin saluting the American flag, and then sold them in 2001 through Spaceflori, the German space memorabilia dealer he formed. Compared to the Irwin patch, this serendipitous moon dust was a bargain: the 12 larger cards sold for $2,495, the 50 smaller ones for $995.

One perfectly legal way to own a moon rock is by finding or buying a lunar meteorite. Here's a New Scientist video (and article) on how to tell if a rock is from the moon:

eBay currently has five auctions offering moon rock meteoritese. The one shown here has a Buy It Now price of $34.90 and is guaranteed by the International Meteorite Collectors Association to be authentic.

My favorite is this "Rare Moon Rock 'Metal' Piece" selling for $2000:

MOON ROCK "METAL"

I'M NOT SURE HOW TO EVEN DESCRIBE THE ITEM.

A GENTLEMAN OWNED A METAL BUSINESS IN THE MIDWEST BACK IN THE 70's & 80'S, ONE OF HIS CUSTOMERS SENT HIM THESE PIECE WITH AN UNUSUAL REQUEST.

HE WANTED THIS PIECE OF MOON ROCK "METAL" MELTED DOWN & PUT INTO ONE OF HIS BATCH OF STEEL.

I'M NOT SURE OF THE REASON IT NEVER GOT DONE BUT HERE IT IS ON EBAY.

COMES WITH CERTIFIED LETTER WITH THE DATES OF THE REQUESTED WORK TO BE DONE. THE NAMES HAVE BEEN "DIGITALLY "WHITED OUT TO PROTECT THE NAMES..

On Saturday, I posted about a new gallery show of Burk Uzzle's Woodstock photos, including the iconic shot seen above left. Turns out, the couple in the photo who had only met a few months before the concert are still together 40 years later. From the New York Daily News (photo Harbus for News):

(Nick and Bobbi Ercoline, now 60,) say they remember nothing of the original shot, taken by Burk Uzzle. "We weren't striking a pose," Nick says. "We were as surprised as everybody to see that photo on the album cover."

They discovered it while at a friend's house listening to the album and passing around the gatefold jacket. First, Nick recognized the famous yellow butterfly staff in the left corner. "It belonged to this guy Herbie," Nick says. "We latched on to him that day because he was having a very bad experience. He was tripping pretty heavily and he had lost his friends. After I saw that staff I said, 'Hey that's our blanket.' Then I said, 'Hey, that's us.'"

Bobbi, then 20, wasn't overly impressed. "Woodstock was over and done with at that time," she says. "It didn't seem like a big deal. The only thing was that then I had to tell my mother I had gone. She didn't know. But by then, she didn't mind."

"Woodstock concert's undercover lovers, Nick and Bobbi Ercoline, 40 years after summer of love" (Thanks, Richard Metzger!)

An anonymous reader writes "Another European country clamps down on free speech. From the article: 'It does seem bizarre that, in 2009, a modern European nation would seek to shield religious belief from criticism — yet that is what is happening in Ireland right now. In repealing the 1961 Defamation Act, the Irish government sought to expunge the worst excesses of Ireland's draconian laws restricting free speech, but in the process it has ended up making offending religious belief a criminal offence. Aside from a 25,000 fine (reduced from the 100,000 originally sought by the government), the new Defamation Act gives the authorities the power to stage raids on publishers: the courts may now issue a warrant authorising the police to enter, using "reasonable force," premises where they have grounds for believing there are copies of "blasphemous statements."'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Susannah Breslin is a guestblogger on Boing Boing. She is a freelance journalist who blogs at Reverse Cowgirl and is at work on a novel set in the adult movie industry.

And so ends my guestblogging stint here on Boing Boing. Thank you so much to Xeni, David, Cory, and Mark for having me! It was a delight, an honor, and a thrill.

I leave you with this awesome video created by Lieutenant Commander Spencer Abbot, who shot this footage from the cockpit of an F/A-18 Hornet with a fiber optic camera stuck to his helmet.

This is a video of a Navy F/A-18 Hornet tanking from Air Force KC-10's and KC-135's (the KC-135 is particularly challenging-- pilots call it the "Iron Maiden"). In turbulent weather, especially at night, tanking can be even tougher than landing on the ship. The basket is heavy, and it can damage the plane if it strikes it, to include shattering the canopy. One can only imagine the amusement of the tanker crews (to whom we're very grateful) as they watch us flail around on a bumpy day.

More videos here, including "an amazing low-level through the Cascades that pilots call 'The Million-Dollar Ride.'"

As for me, you can find me here. Thanks, Boingers!

If you even remotely care about the aesthetics of your computer, you've probably wished at some point that one or more of your components were a different color. For instance, I prefer my computers to be basic black all over, but more than once have been driven to install a beige part because it was what I needed at the right price.

Up until this weekend, I didn't think there was really anything to be done, short of making a mold of the offending part and recasting it in a different color plastic or resin, which is way too much work for such a small annoyance. There's spraypaint, of course, but it's tacky, IMHO; I can almost always identify a spray-painted surface, and although there are good spray paints for plastics on the market today, any kind of finish that leaves a coating on the surface can affect critical dimensional tolerances and impede fit or performance. And it may eventually wear off.

Turns out, however, that there are dyes for plastics, which is counter-intuitive for me because I think of a dye as requiring a porous substrate, and I don't generally think of plastics as porous. To find these products, the googlon is "vinyl dye," and the conventional market is folks restoring automobile interiors. These dyes, although they come in spray cans, are not paints. Their colorants actually adsorb onto the polymer itself and do not leave any kind of coating behind. To do so, they must soften the plastic surface with a solvent, so they can negatively affect its glossiness, but most of the plastic I'd want to dye isn't high-sheen, anyway. Here's a nice tutorial from GideonTech.com.

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I agree with Derren Brown's comments about this video:

PLEASE – do yourself a favour and turn the sound OFF – NOW. I’m almost willing to throw the towel in admit that creationists are right when I hear it. However the video is just brilliant (if you ignore the silly text as well)... Here’s 500 generations every SECOND backed up by actual fossil evidence – shoved in to a computer and animated together. It’s fantastic to watch.

Video: from Australopithecus to Homo sapiens in 5 minutes (Via Daily Grail)

P2P Blog points us to the news that Louisiana State University (LSU) is starting a program whereby it will fine students $50 for unauthorized file sharing. However, the quotes from the university representative seem quite confusing and oftentimes flat out incorrect. The reporter who wrote the article seems equally confused. Nowhere is it explained exactly how it will be determined that someone is actually sharing an unauthorized piece of work, or if there is any sort of actual due process involved at all. Instead, the school seems to think that any accusation means guilt automatically. They also claim, oddly, that the fines are "in accordance with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act." Please, someone, point out to me where it says in the DMCA that your ISP can fine you based on what it thinks you may have done wrong?

The LSU spokesperson, oddly claims that the RIAA's "subpoena" costs $4,000, but that's not true. What she means (I think) is that the RIAA often offers up a "we won't sue you settlement at $4,000. That has nothing to do with the subpoena at all. Even more confusing, she claims that the settlement offer is for the RIAA's "time":

"Once they get a subpoena, they say 'OK, person X, you've done this, now that's $4,000 for our time.' And you have 28 days or something ridiculous to pay it. If you don't pay it, the fine goes up from there."

That's simply not true. First of all, the $4,000 is just a settlement offer. It's not for their time, and it's not a fine. The way she says it "goes up from there" makes it sound as if it's a court granted fine that just keeps going up until you settle. That's not true. Until a court says you need to pay, you don't need to pay. It is an option to get the RIAA to leave you alone, but the RIAA doesn't get to just fine you. But, the LSU folks don't seem to get that. The author of the article doesn't seem to get it either, at one point discussing how the RIAA "has the legal authority to take offenders to court" -- um... anyone has the legal authority to take others to court in civil cases -- and then confuses the civil infringement claims with criminal infringement, suggesting (incorrectly) that if the RIAA takes you to court, you could get "five years in prison." You can only get jailtime in a criminal lawsuit, and, no, thankfully (not yet) the RIAA does not have the legal authority to charge you in criminal court.

The folks at LSU also seem quite confused about technology:

"When you transfer files, they're called packets, and these packets can be identified as to what they are. Usually it's through things like BitTorrent, or through LimeWire, or any other things that are shareware, where people put up stuff illegally or make it available illegally."

Oh, and on top of that, apparently some universities have magically figured out how to stop file sharing. Wish I knew how:

"But there are places that have actually shut off the ability to do any sharing of files because they were getting so many complaints from the RIAA."

And these are the folks who want to start fining people $50 for file sharing, when they don't even seem to understand the law or the technology involved? That's going to go over well...

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An amateur astronomer in Australia was the first person to report the appearance of this black spot on Jupiter on July 19. Anthony Wesley from Canberra wrote on his online journal:

It took another 15 minutes to really believe that I was seeing something new - I'd imaged that exact region only 2 days earlier and checking back to that image showed no sign of any anomalous black spot.

Now I was caught between a rock and a hard place - I wanted to keep imaging but also I was aware of the importance of alerting others to this new event. In the end I imaged for another 30 minutes only because the conditions were slowly improving and each capture was giving a slightly better image than the last.

Eventually I stopped imaging and went up to the house to start emailing people, with this image above processed as quick and dirty as possible just to have something to show.

Impact mark on Jupiter, 19th July 2009

TRNick writes "The old home-computing art of hacking elaborate graphics and camerawork into tiny amounts of memory has been lost, right? Not so. The demoscene is keeping ingenious coding skills alive, and TechRadar finds out the latest developments. Winner of the 4kb competition at 2009's Breakpoint party was RGBA's demo 'Elevated', a gorgeous scrolling demo featuring photo realistic landscapes and music, which fits into the memory used by one of your PC's desktop icons. This is really impressive stuff."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Instructables user piaferre shows us how to slice up a 3D model of an object an recreate it in cardboard and putty. It looks very labor-intensive, but what amazing results!

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Harry writes "2009 marks not only the fortieth anniversary of Apollo 11, but also four decades of the iconic, omnipresent Lunar Lander, one of the first simulation games ever written. The first version was written by an Apollo-crazy high school student; among its countless descendants are the classic Atari arcade machine and versions for practically every other platform, from the Apple II to the iPhone. We're celebrating with a look at the game's origins, history, and significance — including an interview with creator Jim Storer, who hadn't given the game a moment's thought since he left high school, and wasn't aware of the phenomenon he spawned."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Harry writes "2009 marks not only the fortieth anniversary of Apollo 11, but also four decades of the iconic, omnipresent Lunar Lander, one of the first simulation games ever written. The first version was written by an Apollo-crazy high school student; among its countless descendants are the classic Atari arcade machine and versions for practically every other platform, from the Apple II to the iPhone. We're celebrating with a look at the game's origins, history, and significance — including an interview with creator Jim Storer, who hadn't given the game a moment's thought since he left high school, and wasn't aware of the phenomenon he spawned."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In this week's Rebooting The News podcast, I chose Walter Cronkite as our inspiration of the week.

Good barometer reading of where things are currently in regards to web fonts, including the newly proposed .webfont format and how "Typekit appears to be a viable, workable solution. And Typekit is now." #

We've noticed in the past that there have been an awful lot of questionable anti-internet laws proposed in Italy over the past few years, and it appears that's not ending any time soon. The latest, as pointed out by CitMediaLaw is a proposed new law that would potentially fine bloggers as much as $18,000 if they do not remove content called defamatory within in a short period of time. Note that this is not content that a lawsuit finds to be defamatory, but merely content that someone declares to be defamatory. In other words, it's a great way to force bloggers to delete any content someone doesn't like. As the article notes, with so much of the mainstream media in the country owned by the Prime Minister himself, having alternative outlets for news and information is important -- but this bill would put serious chilling effects on those alternative outlets. In response, a bunch of bloggers have apparently gone on "strike" and refused to post content one day to protest the proposed law.

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Carrie McLaren is a guest blogger at Boing Boing and coauthor of Ad Nauseam: A Survivor's Guide to American Consumer Culture. She lives in Brooklyn, the former home of her now defunct Stay Free! magazine.

For you commies who support low-power community radio, today is Call Your Congressperson and Plea for Low Power FM Day. Prometheus Radio is behind an effort to pass the Local Community Radio Act (HR 1247/S592), which could open the airwaves to tens of thousands of new community radio stations across the country. It only takes a minute or two:

1. Look up your Congressional Representative at Congress.org?
2. Find out if they have already supported the Local Community Radio Act. ?See a list of cosponsors at govtrack.us and search for Bill number HR 1147.?
   
3. Call the Congressional Switchboard at: (202) 224-3121 and ask to be connected to your Representative's office.
   

* If your representative is not a cosponsor tell him/her to support expanding Low Power FM all across the country and cosponsor the bill.
* If your representative is a cosponsor ask him/her to reach out to Congressional Leadership to let them know that this is an important priority around the county.

Info: Prometheus Radio
(Photo: Yaldabaoth)

Bryan Gividen writes "Time.com is running a story on the previously unidentified blob floating off of the coast of Alaska. The article states that the blob is an algae bloom — far less sinister (or exciting) than any The Thing or The Blob comparison that was jokingly made. From the article: '"It's sort of like a swimming pool that hasn't been cleaned in a while." The blob, Konar said, is a microalgae made up of 'billions and billions of individuals.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"That's one small step for (a) man, one giant leap for mankind." - Neil Armstrong, July 20, 1969

Ray Wilson of MFOS demonstrates the use of his WSG project under the control of a basic sequencer. Skip ahead to the 4m20s mark for a straightforward explanation of how this simple mod does its thing. Though Ray uses an MFOS 10-step sequencer with above, this would likely work with any basic 4017-based sequencer (or any other 0-9V output for that matter). Detailed instructions available on the WSG mods page.

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<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/majet/sets/72157621167555072/
">

Nature photographer and maker Marco Jetti wanted a device that would allow him to shoot pictures of animals from a distance. Using a pair of walkie-talkies and a custom circuit, Marco fashioned a long distance wireless shutter trigger capable of releasing the shutter from, reportedly, almost a kilometer away.

[via DIYPhotography]

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Find out why he told us "That's not going to happen." Buzz Aldrin: Engineer, rapper, heart-breaking realist

Old-school bOING bOING pal Jim Leftwich writes:

I saw that you'd posted links to photos of Woodstock on its 40th anniversary.

Thirty-five years ago today The Ozark Music Festival began in my hometown of Sedalia, Missouri (July 19, 20, 21, 1974). It was sort of the Woodstock of the Midwest:

• A page on the interesting and little-known history of the event.

• A collection of good black and white photos (by David Mann) from the event (a few of them are NSFW).

• My Ozark Music Festival button.

Paul Di Filippo sent me this editorial by Richard Nash, founder of Soft Skull Press (publishers of the Get Your War on books): "Why Publishing Cannot Be Saved (As It Is)." It's a ass-kicking take on the hackneyed cliches of those who discuss the future of the publishing industry ("Twitter/DRM/Facebook/copyright law will save us!") and is worth reading for this incredibly smart thing alone: "books are orders of magnitude more demanding of our minds than any other media."

The question increasingly arises in today's media: can publishing be saved? No. It cannot and should not. There are plenty of non-profit publishers that exist to create and distribute the un-economic content. For-profit publishing should not be saved -- it should figure out new business models, ones that offer services that both readers and writers want and are happy to pay for. We cannot wait for a deus ex machina to descend. (In other words, neither MySpace, nor Twitter, nor price-fixing, nor some new piracy-inducing extension of copyright law will save publishing -- we simply need to start doing business better.)

What are those services? It's premature to state definitively, but we need to start with the conversation, so that we can listen to what the readers want. Clearly the reading group is the best thing that happened to publishing in the past 30 years -- while reading is solitary, talking about books is social. Given that books are orders of magnitude more demanding of our minds than any other media, they are commensurately better reflections of our minds and identities than other media. We publishers should be servicing readers' desire to communicate about themselves with peers, offering books as the basis for connecting.

We're also going to have to recognize that reading increasingly is writing -- readers are writing back in all sorts of ways, commenting on books, re-mixing books as in fan fiction, or creating from scratch, and publishers, rather than barring this activity, or hiding from it, need to embrace it and find ways to serve it.

Why Publishing Cannot Be Saved (As It Is)

Hugh Pickens writes "BBC reports that six puppies cloned from a Canadian-born sniffer dog in late 2007 have reported for duty to check for drugs at Seoul's Incheon International Airport after completing a 16-month training course. The customs agency says clones help to lower crime-fighting costs as it is difficult to find good sniffer dogs. Only about 30% of naturally-born sniffer dogs make the grade, but South Korean scientists say that could rise to 90% using the cloning method. The puppies, each called 'Toppy' for 'Tomorrow's Puppy,' are part of a litter of seven who were cloned from a 'superb' drug-sniffing Canadian Labrador retriever called Chase at a cost of about $239,000. 'They are the world's first cloned sniffer dogs deployed at work,' says customs spokesman Park Jeong-Heon. 'They showed better performances in detecting illegal drugs during the training than other naturally-born sniffer dogs that we have.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The mysterious massive "blob" moving through the Arctic Ocean is actually an algae bloom. From Time:

It was a dark, floating mass stretching for miles through the Chukchi Sea, a frigid and relatively shallow expanse of Arctic Ocean water between Alaska's northwest coast and the Russian Far East. The goo was fibrous, hairy. When it touched floating ice, it looked almost black...

While Alaskans may find the algal blob unusual if not frightening, scientists say that algal blooms are nothing new in Arctic Ocean waters, though the blob itself might be a little weird. Brenda Konar, a marine biology professor at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, said algal outbreaks can and do occur even in icy Arctic waters. It just takes the right combination of nutrients, light and water temperature, she said. "Algae blooms," she says. "It's sort of like a swimming pool that hasn't been cleaned in a while." The blob, Konar said, is a microalgae made up of "billions and billions of individuals." "We've observed large blooms in the past off Barrow although none of them at all like this," Barry Sherr, an Oregon State University professor of oceanography, said in an e-mail. "The fact that the locals say they've never seen anything like it suggests that it might represent some exotic species which has drifted into the region, perhaps as a result of global change. For the moment that's just a guess."

Arctic Mystery: Identifying the Great Blob of Alaska (Thanks, Sean Ness!)

This curious antique door knocker, depicting a woman with a massive tongue, is up for auction on eBay. From the listing:

A door knocker in the shape of an ill woman's face. Her tongue is the knocker. Marked manufacture, nineteenth century, made of spelter or some other non-magnetic base metal, I bought this in England. The manufacturer's stamp is on the underside of the tongue: "R.E.&S." inside a shield. The piece measures 5.125" long and 2.25" wide. Good working condition.

"19th C.Metal DOOR KNOCKER Sick Woman TONGUE Medical" (Thanks, Michael-Anne Rauback!)

It's become popular for old school newspaper folks to hate on Google and other aggregators for somehow "profiting" off of their content. This is wrong on many, many levels. First, the aggregators send traffic to newspaper sites. They're promoting the newspapers' content. That's a good thing. But much more important is that they're barely profiting from it, if they're profiting at all. That's why it's odd to see some newspaper folks like Howard Owens think that the answer to the newspaper industry's woes is to create their own aggregator and start making all that cash.

Except, uh, someone forgot the part where Google and the others don't actually make much, if any, money in aggregating all of that content. At best, it's a loss leader for most such sites. Chris Tolles, who runs Topix -- which is an aggregator that tried to play that game and realized how little money there was in it, before changing business models, has a fantastic response to Owens that should be read in its entirety, but here's a brief snippet. It starts off in response to Owen's claim that Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL make ("conservatively") $15 billion from "news and news-related content":

Uh. No. That's just wrong.

AOL annual revenue is $4.2B, Google $21.8B, MSN ~$2B, and Yahoo $7.2B

So, since the grand total is around $36B, Google news is pretty much a non revenue products, and Google was doing just fine with little or no news results in their main index until the last couple of years. Yahoo does put news ina lot of their products, but certainly, nowhere near 50% of their advertising is sold against news, as is the same for AOL and MSN.

(Oh and last time I checked the newspaper industry advertising revenue was $37.85B)

News is a crap search product, and a loss leader, which is a big reason why Google news was in beta for years, and unmonetized, and why many news-centric searches get no ads next to them.

News is an unprofitable search. Since we at Topix are an adsense partner, and I am a downstream beneficiary to what revenues there are here, I know what kind of eCPM news brings and how hard it is to make money on aggregated "news" content.

....

So if you built a news aggregator, powered by journalists, this would somehow unlock the value and get to $1.5B in annual revenues?

NO. YOU WOULDN"T.

If that was true, Daylife, Inform, newsvine and the myriad of other startups would be actually making a ton of money and chewing up the pop charts. Or Digg for that matter, or the Huffington Post.

BUT THEY AREN'T, ARE THEY?

Closer to home, I have some experience in running a news site here at Topix, and having talked to Howard while he was at McClatchy (and one of our investors), I am somewhat puzzled since I actually talked him personally about the economics of news search a few years ago.

We've built a site which is,according to comScore, the #2 "newspaper" site online. We actually had a program for a while where' we'd give 50% of all ad revenues back to publishers who wanted to syndicate content to us. Didn't work worth a damn.

Once again, as these newspaper guys struggle to recognize what business they're in, they seem to reach out and attack Google, without even recognizing what it is they're attacking. They don't want to take the time to understand their own business (hint: it's never been "selling content"), so perhaps it's not surprising that they don't bother to understand the business of those they compete against either. And, if anything is causing the industry to falter it's that simple fact. If they can't understand the business they're in (or how others are beating them) then they're not going to do a very good job fixing themselves, will they?

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Eric Archer posts thorough instructions on cloning snare, hi-hat, and bass drum circuitry from the legendary Roland TR-808 drum machine. The relevant PDF files include schematics (updated with available parts), detailed protoboard layout, triggering tips, and more - grab them over at his Roland TR-808 Clone page.

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Barence writes "Internet Explorer 8 will no longer replace the default browser when a user selects the 'Use express settings' option during installation. Back in May, Mozilla and Opera accused Microsoft of force-feeding users Internet Explorer 8 through the Automatic Updates process. The object of their ire was the 'Use express settings' option which automatically sets Internet Explorer 8 as the default browser. The option was already ticked when Automatic Updates offered users the choice to upgrade their browser. 'We heard a lot of feedback from a lot of different people and groups and decided to make the user choice of the default browser even more explicit,' notes Microsoft in a blog post."

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The MAKEcation learn to solder bundle is a fun collection of all things blinky. All the kits are easy to solder and each one makes a fun little blinky piece of hardware. The bundle also includes our Maker's Notebook and MAKE Volume 01, which features a great learn to solder tutorial. Have fun this summer, learn to solder, and blink some LEDs!

Features:

• MAKE Volume 01 $14.99 value
• tinyCylon $10 value
• Wee Blinky $8 value
• Lux Spectralis $10 value
• Maker's Notebook $19.99 value

More about The MAKEcation learn to solder bundle

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While I was off for my birthday weekend, Amazon gave me a little present: a ready-made object lesson in the dangers of digital rights management for ebooks. Hundreds of readers who'd bought the "Works of George Orwell" found that the books had become un-books, vanishing from their Kindles. The books' owners got a credit for the $5 purchase price and a note saying Amazon had had a dispute with the books' publisher and decided to take it away.

Orwell's works are in the public domain in many parts of the world, but not in the USA, which has an incredibly long term of copyright. A publisher specializing in bringing public domain books into print put its whole catalog on Amazon, who then got a copyright notice from the people who control the Orwell literary estate. Amazon decided to resolve the dispute by taking the Orwellian step of un-selling the books from its customers' devices, sending them down the memory hole.

There are some who'll argue that this was just what copyright law requires, but as the Electronic Frontier Foundation notes,

if Amazon didn't have the rights to sell the e-books in the first place, the infringement happened when the books were sold. Remote deletion doesn't change that, and it's not an infringement for the Kindle owner simply to read the book. Can you imagine a brick-and-mortar bookstore chasing you home, entering your house, and pulling a book from your shelf after you paid good money for it? (Nor, for that matter, does Amazon reserve any "remote deletion" right the Kindle "terms of service".)

Indeed, this problem is endemic to DRM, because rightsholders have often argued for the right to revoke content or features (the Kindle's text-to-speech feature has already been revoked from hundreds of books after a rightsholder dispute) from devices. The problem is that device owners (that's you and me) aren't a party to these disputes or negotiations. When a rightsholder decides to brick your DVD recorder because some clever teenager figured out how to crack its DRM, you don't get a seat at the table where the MPAA and some DRM consortium are arguing about how long your device should be shut down for. When a rightsholder sends a nastygram to Amazon, you don't get a say in whether to treat the claim as valid or bogus.

Amazon claims that they won't do this again. But as every good novelist knows, "A gun on the mantlepiece in act one must go off by act three." Once it's possible for the mothership to remotely zap all our devices, the possibility exists that a hacker will attack them, or a courtroom will order an injunction against them (at one point, a US magistrate ordered ReplayTV to send out a firmware update that would brick its devices as part of the preliminaries to a court case), or the feature will go haywire, or the management of Amazon will change.

The most secure device spec for a device is one in which it is not designed to enforce policy against its owner, period. Devices might still be subverted into attacking their owners, but this will always be more likely to take place if the designers created a "feature" that is supposed to do this.

Ironically, this came after a rollicking debate on ebook DRM on Pan Macmillan (UK)'s The Digitalist blog, wherein publishers, technologists, writers, and readers all chimed in for a long, in depth discussion of the subject.

Mad Kane's got commentary in limerick form:

Have you noticed your e-book list dwindle?
You're probably using a Kindle.
A book that you bought
Has turned into naught --
Replaced with a refund. No swindle?

Yet the seller invaded your house.
And did it by clicking a mouse.
Something's there. Then it's not.
(An Orwellian plot?)
You're surely entitled to grouse.

Delete this book (Thanks, Johne!)

TorrentFreak is reporting an on-the-record remark by the main RIAA spokesman acknowledging what has been obvious to the rest of the world for some time now. Let's see whether their actions going forward align with the words. "Jonathan Lamy, chief spokesperson for the RIAA[,] declared DRM dead, when he was asked about the RIAA's view on DRM for an upcoming SCMagazine article. "DRM is dead, isn't it?" Lamy said, referring to the DRM-less iTunes store and other online outfits that now offer music without restrictions."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Sonic840 posted a nice visual reference for computer hardware sockets & connectors over at DeviantArt. As the author notes in the comments, there's even more that could be added - still definitely handy as is. [via Hack a Day]

More:

Microcontroller cheat sheet

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Okay, mom, dad, so maybe you're feeling a little of the ol' economic pinch and the idea of stuffing the brood into the family cargo pod, filling its belly full of precious dinosaur squeezin's, and setting off for Wally World just doesn't sit comfortably on your bottom line this summer. You've decided to stay at home and the kids are non too thrilled about it. Why not get everybody together and announce that the family isn't going on a vacation this year, you're going on a MAKEcation. You're going to spend some quality time together as a family, making cool projects and learning some new skills in the process. And you're going to document your DIY summer and send your MAKEcation videos and pics to Make: Online, to seek fame (and a few nifty prizes) in the process.

Welcome to Make: Online's MAKEcation, 2009
Over the next few months, we're going to be running contests, issuing family challenges, offering project ideas and tech tips, all geared towards families doing DIY together at home. If you REALLY want to go away, we're also going to be offering ideas on maker-oriented vacations, cool educational, hands-on destinations you can visit and fun things you can do on the road. But most of what we'll cover will be projects and activities for your kitchen table and backyard. We're also bringing on "Camp Counselors," experts in the area of each challenge. They'll be on-hand to offer advice, answer any technical questions, and to blow their whistles if things get too rowdy. We'll also have our counselors involved in helping us look through your MAKEcation videos and pictures to choose who to give prizes away to (more on that later).

Our first MAKEcation project is "Teach Your Family to Solder" Week. Soldering is something that every maker should know how to do. Far too many people are intimated by the idea. It seems hard to do, it looks like it might be hard to do, and you think it is if you casually try it without the proper do and don'ts in mind (and the right tools). In point of fact, with a little practice and few key pointers, anybody, from about a tween to any-age adult (with decent enough eyesight and a steady hand) can do through-hole component soldering. We can almost guarantee that if you follow the instructions we'll be giving you throughout the week, and do some of the beginner projects we'll suggest (or similar), you'll be a successful solderer in a week's time. Knowing this skill will open you up to a lot of the projects you see in MAKE magazine and here on the site.

To help us for this project, we've enlisted the help of one of our favorite makers, Dave Hyrinkiw of Solarbotics and HVW Technologies. Besides running these two amazing mom and pop electronics shops, Dave is an icon in the BEAM hobby robotics community. The "A" in "BEAM" stands for aesthetics, so good BEAMbots are known for their arty, freeform construction (and that means neat and well-done soldering). Dave has been selling electronics and designing and building BEAMbots for as long as I can remember, so that makes him a perfect candidate to be our first MAKEcation Camp Counselor. Dave will be on-hand during the week and beyond, so if you have any soldering questions, send them to me (gareth@makezine.com) and I'll make sure that he gets them. We'll collect them up and do a posting of any Q&A at the end of the week.

Later on today, I'll have a Toolbox column covering everything you'll need to get started in soldering. We also have the first of our MAKEcation bundles in the Maker Shed with several great beginner kits to get you started (plus a copy of the premier issues of MAKE, which includes an excellent soldering primer, and a copy of The Maker's Notebook, so you can document your family's MAKEcation).

Obviously, if someone in the family already knows how to solder, go ahead and start teaching all of the other eligible family members. Even kids that are too young to safely solder can get involved, by helping to put components in the holes on PCBs, clipping the leads on soldered parts, etc. Just make sure they're supervised, not close to the soldering irons, and that the power cables to the iron(s) can't be tripped over. Make sure to take photos/video of the family at work and send the links to us. And maybe dream up some cool project that everyone can work on together and document that as well.

More:
Let's take a Summer MAKEcation!

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Munch from Belgrade seems to have shoehorned Google's Android OS onto a dual-boot Nokia N95. The demo videos are rather grainy, but you can make out Android booting up and Google Maps running fullscreen. Munch vows to release the code for installation October 5th on his blog.

If you manage to get this running on your N95 when it's released, leave a note in the comments.

[via gizmodo]

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Last week's review of Top Shelf Jazz's new CD "Fast and Louche" sparked a suggestion in the comments from AnoniMouse to check out The Zydepunks, a band that bills itself as "New Orleans' Favorite Cajun Irish Jewish Punk band." The band were kind enough to send along the MP3s of their latest CD, the 2008 release "Finisterre" and it is some deeply kick-ass stuff.

Combining sweet, old-fashioned zydeco with Flogging-Molly-esque Celt-punk and upbeat klezmer is an improbable idea, but goddamn it works. Especially on uptempo tracks like "One More Chance," "Long Story Short" and "Papirossen In Gan Eden," (the last performed in Yiddish with some major Celtic and zydeco flavor) the Zydepunks make me want to get up on my chair and shout and wave my arms in the air. Thanks for the tip, AnoniMouse!

Finisterre (Amazon)

Zydepunks.com

Last week, we wrote about how the National Portrait Gallery in the UK was threatening a guy who uploaded a bunch of photos from the Gallery's site to Wikipedia and defended his upload by noting that the portraits in question were all in the public domain. The Gallery insists that the photos of the portraits are not in the public domain, and that's where the heart of the legal dispute lies -- though, there are some side issues. In the US, it's pretty clear that a photo of a public domain work remains in the public domain (assuming no additional creative expression is added). In the UK, it's unsettled law. However, as the situation gets more attention, some interesting facts are coming out.

The National Gallery is claiming that a big part of the reason for why it's doing this is that it has cost £1 million to digitize the photos, and removing the ability to license the images makes it less likely that others will digitize their own collections. That's not a bad argument (though, there isn't necessarily a legal basis that copyright should be based on how much it costs to create the work in question). However, someone decided to check on those numbers, and put in a Freedom of Information request, and discovered that the actual costs to digitize and put the collection online was significantly lower than what the Gallery is claiming:

The Gallery spent £18,000 to put its collections online in 1999. During a ten year period up to 2008 another £10,000 was spent on minor developments and adjustments and in 2008 and 2009 a further £11,000 was spent. This gives a total figure of £39,000.

Now, that's not nothing, but £39,000 is significantly lower than £1 million, yes?

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While some record labels and groups like ASCAP are telling musicians they should hold their music back from video games like Rock Band and Guitar Hero without larger upfront payments, most smart musicians recognize that getting their music out on these popular platforms is a great way to build up a much bigger (and more loyal) following. But, of course, the process to get into these games has been pretty difficult. So it's neat to see an effort from Harmonix and MTV Games to make it easier for independent artists to get their music into the games, if in a somewhat limited fashion. It still involves something of a hassle, but opening up the platform further is a good idea. You would think that one of these games would one day go fully open and trump the other by having a much wider selection of content -- with plenty of bands focusing on that provider, rather than the more limited one.

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Reservoir Hill writes "The NY Times has an article investigating why, unlike the articles on Wikipedia which in theory are improved, fact checked, footnoted, and generally enhanced over time, the photos that go with Wikipedia articles are so bad and in many cases there is no photo at all for even well known public figures. Few high-quality photographs, particularly of celebrities, make it onto on Wikipedia because Wikipedia runs only pictures with the most permissive Creative Commons license, which allows anyone to use an image, for commercial purposes or not, as long as the photographer is credited. 'Representatives or publicists will contact us' horrified at the photographs on the site, says Jay Walsh, a spokesman for the Wikimedia Foundation. 'They will say: "I have this image. I want you to use this image." But it is not as simple as uploading a picture that is e-mailed to us.' Recent photographs on Wikipedia are almost exclusively the work of amateurs who don't mind giving away their work. 'Amateur may be too kind a word; their photos tend to be the work of fans who happen to have a camera,' opines the Times's author. Ultimately the issue for professional photographers who might want to donate their work is copyright. 'To me the problem is the Wikipedia rule of public use,' says Jerry Avenaim, a celebrity photographer. 'If they truly wanted to elevate the image on the site, they should allow photographers to maintain the copyright.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Britain's National Portrait Gallery is threatening to sue Wikipedia for including some of its high-rez scans of public domain portraits. In Britain, copyright law apparently gives a new copyright to someone who produces an image full of public domain material, effectively creating perpetual copyright for a museum that owns the original image, since they can decide who gets to copy it and then set terms on those copies that prevent them being treated as public domain.

The NPG, whose budget is almost entirely derived from public funds, supplements its income by licensing photos of its paintings to books and for the web. They are so protective of this small bit of income that they even prohibit photographs of their "no photography" signs (they argue that these signs are copyrighted).

They argue that they can service the public -- whose taxes sustain them -- by extracting additional rents from photos instead of seeing to it that they are widely distributed. This is an increasingly common argument by public institutions, for example, the BBC jealously guards its additional DVD income and shies away from any kind of public archive that might undermine it, saying that the five percent of its budget derived from commercial operations is so important that the material funded with the other 95 percent of its income -- which comes directly from the public -- should be locked up.

At the end of the day, you either buy this argument or you don't. I don't. If you take public money to buy art, you should make that art available to the public using the best, most efficient means possible. If you believe the public wants to subsidize the creation of commercial art-books, then get out of the art-gallery business, start a publisher and hit the government up for some free tax-money.

I don't really think that this has anything to do with income. I think it's the NPG's ingrained philosophical approach. A couple years ago, they had a show of pop-art portraits by the likes of Warhol, et al, and practically every single portrait represented some kind of copyright infringement. Seemingly without irony, the NPG prohibited photos of these infringing works "to protect their copyright." At the time, I asked whether they were celebrating the creativity of the pop arts, or eulogizing it. Today's Warhols have no friends at the NPG, who are only interested in celebrating fair dealing if it took place 30 years ago.

"It is hard to see a plausible argument that excluding public domain content from a free, non-profit encyclopaedia serves any public interest whatsoever," he wrote.

He points out that two German photographic archives donated 350,000 copyrighted images for use on Wikipedia, and other institutions in the United States and the UK have seen benefits in making material available for use.

Another Wikipedia volunteer David Gerard has blogged about the row, claiming that the National Portrait Gallery makes only £10-15,000 a year from web licensing, less than it makes "selling food in the cafe".

Wikipedia painting row escalates (Thanks, Fee!)

Adam Koford (real name: Ape Lad) has a terrific new shirt for sale on shirt.woot for $10. Adam was the curator/editor of series of shirts for sale this week on shirt.woot. He was also kind enough to ask me to contribute a design, which I'll post when it becomes available later this week.

The Evil That Men Do Except Instead Of Men It’s A Kite

Please welcome our guestbloggers for the next two weeks, the writing team of McLaren and Torchinsky!

I'm Jason Torchinsky, and I'm delighted to be guestblogging for the next two weeks with my writing partner Carrie McLaren. Carrie and I are co-editors of Ad Nauseam: A Survivor's Guide to American Consumer Culture. The book is an irreverent collection of new and previously published work from Stay Free!, the sadly defunct magazine Carrie founded. We're very proud of how it turned out, and we hope all of you in the Boing Boing-reading world will like it, too.

Carrie and I will be blogging about some of the infuriating, funny, gut-wrenching, and mildly interesting aspects of consumer culture, advertising, and its effect on our lives and minds. I'll also be doing lots of blogging on space travel, technological dead ends, dogs, robots, and the usual palette of dorky interests that make the web such a hit with the kids. I'm pretty sure Carrie will also be doing lots of blogging about apes and monkeys, too. She loves primates.

To give a bit more background on us, Carrie lives in Brooklyn with a husband and baby, and runs the great Adult Education lecture series in Brooklyn. I live in Los Angeles with an unofficial wife and a bunch of animals, and I write for the Onion News Network, and once made a giant Atari joystick.

The Narrative Fallacy writes "NASA has spent years getting ready for a crowd in space — adding additional sleeping quarters, learning how to recycle liquid waste into drinking water, and installing a second bathroom last year. But now the main toilet has broken down on the International Space Station while a record 13 astronauts are on board. For now Mission Control has advised the astronauts to hang an 'out of service' sign on the toilet as it may take days to repair. In the meantime, Endeavour's seven astronauts will be restricted to the shuttle bathroom. Last year a Russian cosmonaut complained that he was no longer allowed to use the US toilet because of billing and cost issues. Now the six space ISS residents will have to get in line to use the back-up toilet in the Russian part of the station. The pump separator on the malfunctioning toilet has apparently flooded, and ESA astronaut Frank De Winne is the guy tasked with putting his plumbing skills to work on short notice. 'We don't yet know the extent of the problem,' says flight director Brian Smith, adding that the toilet troubles were 'not going to be an issue' for now."

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Ellen Kushner sez,

The Interstitial Arts Foundation supports artists whose work falls outside of traditional disciplines, genres and other classification systems. This fall the IAF is publishing Interfictions 2, its second anthology of short interstitial fiction, and it's conducting an experiment in crowdfunding to make it happen.

The IAF has broken down the cost to publish and promote the book and posted the list to its site ($25 sends out 5 copies of the book to reviewers, $100 prints up promotional postcards, $200 buys a magazine ad, and so on), and would-be supporters are invited to make donations. Donors making contributions of $375 or above BY JULY 31ST will not only receive signed copies of both anthologies and have their names included in an online supporters list, but will get their names published in the printed edition of Interfictions 2.

This is actually the second of several experiments in crowdsourcing attached to the project: earlier this year, the IAF opened up a Flickr group to solicit possible images for the cover. The winner, Alex Myers' "E", was selected from this pool and was created as a mixed-media piece from cereal boxes. A third crowdsourced project, also currently open for entries, swaps a free story from the new anthology for a small piece of art inspired by that story, which will then be auctioned off by the IAF to support publication of the book.

Interfictions 2 includes new works from Jeffrey Ford, Amelia Beamer and Theodora Goss, and a foreword from Henry Jenkins (until recently the co-director of MIT's Comparative Media Studies program, now the Ovost's Professor of Communications, Journalism, and Cinematic Art at USC).

Support Interfictions 2! (Thanks, Ellen!)

Brett sez,

his is a link where fans of national bestseller Robert J. Wiersema (author of BEFORE I WAKE, Random House, 2006) can pick up his new novella, THE WORLD MORE FULL OF WEEPING, releasing September 15 through small press start-up ChiZine Publications. (Quite a coup for a little Canadian press like us!)

The signed, limited edition hardcover will be available for pre-order only until the end of August, then that's it -- however many are ordered is the number that will be printed.

We think BB readers will be interested in this because Rob's debut novel, BEFORE I WAKE, was a bestseller, and was named to many periodicals' top 100 lists for 2006. They'll also be interested because this will be Rob's only release until his second (gigantic doorstop of a) novel through Random House in 2010. So for those jonesing for new Wiersema, this haunting little novella will have to tide them over until late next year.

THE WORLD MORE FULL OF WEEPING by Robert J. Wiersema (Limited Edition) (Thanks, Brett!)

The blog of Anthony Wesley, an Australian amateur astronomer, has what may be the first photos of a recent comet or asteroid impact on Jupiter, near the south pole. These photos are 11 hours old. The ones at the bottom of the page show three small dark spots in addition to the main dark mark. The Bad Astronomy blog picked up the story a few hours later — but cautions that what we're seeing may not be an impact event. This is all reminiscent of the closely watched impact of comet Shoemaker-Levy on Jupiter in 1994.

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Whatever you think about the likelihood that a new kind of DVDs could last for 1,000 years, this note from reader crazyeyes should give you pause about expecting current CD-Rs to be reliably readable for decades. TechARP found a failure rate near 10% for CD-Rs recorded 7 to 9 years ago, after storage in ideal conditions. On some, one or more individual files could not be recovered; others were not reliably readable on two separate drives. "In the past, hard disk drives were small (in capacity) and costly. To make up for the lack of affordable storage, many turned to CD-Rs. As it became common to store backups and personal pictures, videos, etc. on CD-Rs, the lifespan of these discs became a concern. According to manufacturers, CD-Rs should last for decades. Some even quoted an upper limit of 120 years based on accelerated aging tests! That sure is a long time, isn't it? But will CD-Rs really last that long?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.