A follow up to our Kangaroo Kindle how-to, Amazon's CEO says sorry for deleting the 1984 books (and others) -

This is an apology for the way we previously handled illegally sold copies of 1984 and other novels on Kindle. Our "solution" to the problem was stupid, thoughtless, and painfully out of line with our principles. It is wholly self-inflicted, and we deserve the criticism we've received. We will use the scar tissue from this painful mistake to help make better decisions going forward, ones that match our mission.

Amazon likely earned a lot of customers back with this - good job Jeff and gang. Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Gadgets | Digg this!

A bunch of folks keep submitting various versions of this story about how Microsoft has apparently received a patent on join-leave in split-screen multiplayer games. We see so many of these sorts of stories these days, it's getting a bit tiresome to talk about them, but no less disappointing. As Matt Peckham says in the article linked here:

In any case, the idea that methodologies like these get tied up in patent law is unsettling. Games, like books, television shows, movies, works of visual art, etc. thrive off of (and to a considerable extent, are inexorably bound up in) a certain amount of healthy imitation. Dynamic split-screen "multi-play" in video games is a process independent of a patentable mechanism like the Wii-remote. Clapping a patent on it isn't so radically far off from claiming

typing

like

THIS

or

sOmEtHiNg

...is a "process" or "procedure" or "methodology" someone ought to have "sole right to make, use, or sell."

Patent law is depressing. It's a somewhat perverse way to stockpile vaguely defined, often semantically specious technological speculation and, whatever its claims about competitively encouraging creativity, often has the contrary effect of throttling it.

If so many people in and around the industry realize how silly and stifling these sorts of patents are, why do they still exist? Why do millions get wasted every year stockpiling more of these patents? Why do we, as a society, allow it?

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Hugh Pickens writes "The NY Times has an interesting story on the logistical problems involved in transporting disassembled towers that will reach more than 250 feet in height from ports or factories to the remote, windy destinations where the turbines are erected. In Idaho trucks laden with tall turbine parts have slammed into interstate overpasses requiring hundreds of thousands of dollars in repairs, in Texas the constant truck traffic is tearing up small roads in the western part of the state where the turbines are being rapidly erected, and in Maine a truck carrying a big piece of turbine got stuck for hours while trying to round a corner near Searsport."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Carlos found this little safe in the trash. It's got stuff locked away inside. He wants in, but doesn't want to destroy the safe. So he created a Pololu Micro Serial Servo Controller-powered, servo-controlled, robot safe-cracker, house in an old PC power supply.

The results? So far: safe: 1, bot-cracker: 0. Turns out, the servo motor and gearing was not precise enough to turn the dial reliably. Carlos is going to try a stepper motor next. He decided to post the project failure so that others would have the benefit of his mistakes.

Gentle Safe Cracker [via @bre's Twitter channel]

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Posted today on the Kindle Community page at Amazon.com:

This is an apology for the way we previously handled illegally sold copies of 1984 and other novels on Kindle. Our "solution" to the problem was stupid, thoughtless, and painfully out of line with our principles. It is wholly self-inflicted, and we deserve the criticism we've received. We will use the scar tissue from this painful mistake to help make better decisions going forward, ones that match our mission.

With deep apology to our customers,

Jeff Bezos
Founder & CEO
Amazon.com

Sounds sincere. Of course, now Amazon needs to walk the walk.

An Apology from Amazon

An anonymous reader writes "SpinVox offers to convert voice messages to text using a system called D2 or 'the Brain.' According to BBC News, said 'Brain' is often of the old-fashioned kind: SpinVox is sending private voice messages to South Africa, the Philippines, and maybe Egypt to be typed by people in a call centre, despite being registered as keeping all private data inside Europe and claiming that the text is somehow anonymised. Insiders say they transcribed 'love messages, secret messages' and everything else from beginning to end, and the company is being bled dry by the cost: SpinVox has been locked out of one of their data centers over a payment dispute. SpinVox refuses to comment further on details — but according to their web page, they're 'enabling the Speech 3.0, Voice 3.0, and Business 3.0 markets,' whatever that means."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ah, the stories that just make you shake your head in wonder. The purpose of a movie trailer is that it's a commercial. It's a pure advertisement with the math being simple: the more people you get to see it, the more likely you are to get people interested in shelling out cash to see the actual film. As such, you would think that anyone would be thrilled if people are actively promoting that advertisement for you. Not at the Walt Disney company, apparently. After a trailer of the hotly-anticipated Tim Burton adaptation of Alice in Wonderland hit YouTube, Disney sent a takedown notice to pull it offline. Because heaven forbid people actually want to see the advertisement they put out.

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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. He lives in Los Angeles, where he is a tinkerer and artist 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.

I'm not sure what I like more, that you can get a miniature Bible or a set of Rosaries for 50¢, or that this is owned by a company called "Impulse Amusements". You know, for when you find it impulsively amusing to have the blood of Christ wash away your sins.

Plus, my ichthyologist's brother's friend's horse's roomate's cousin swears he once got a piece of the True Cross in one of these.

Rival writes "As an inquisitive and creative geek, I am constantly coming up with 'clever' ideas. Most often I discover fundamental or practical flaws lurking in the details, which I'm fine with. As Edison said, 'I haven't failed; I've found 10,000 ways that don't work.' Other times, I discover that someone else has beaten me to the idea. I'm fine with that, too. At least I know that I've come up with a great idea, even if I'm not the first. There are times, however, when I can find no flaws with an idea and nobody else seems to have thought of it. I'm not conceited enough to think my idea is genius; I just assume that I'm not knowledgeable enough to see what I'm missing. In these times, I often want to ask a subject matter expert for their thoughts. On the admittedly long chance that an idea is genius, however, what is the best way to ask for another's insights while mitigating the risk of them stealing or sharing the idea? Asking a stranger to sign a contract before discussing an idea seems like a good way to get a door closed on my face. What are your experiences and suggestions?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Enter the plugged-in world of Tim Kaiser, a maker who fashions experimental musical instruments from scavenged objects. In the Workshop John Park assembles a portable trebuchet from plastic plumbing pipe, and circuit bender Bianca Pettis demystifies the art of soldering. The Maker Channel presents a Smash Bat that snaps moment-of-impact photos, a drum synthesizer played with Skittles, a pedal-powered tennis ball launcher, and an evil mouse that causes the cursor to misbehave when moved. Watch in HD at blip.

Get the m4v or subscribe in iTunes

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Suicide Girls, who were among the first advertisers ever on Boing Boing way back in the day, have released a Comic-Con themed photoset of bangin' babes in cosplay getup. Yes, yes, it's blatant booth-bait and link-bait, but these really are fun photos (vampy but work-safe, no bewbs).

Eric points us to yet another story of yet another artist getting pissed off that his own videos have been pulled from YouTube. The writeup suggests that this is about competing record labels issuing bogus DMCA-style takedowns on artists as a part of their competitive fervor, but I'm not sure that's true in this case. The artist, Calvin Harris, is based in the UK, who is signed to Sony Music. In the UK, due to a royalty dispute, Google has removed all official major label music from the site. So contrary to TechCrunch's reporting, it seems that this may just be collateral damage of the silly royalty dispute, rather than nefarious competitors issuing bogus takedowns. Still, the point remains: this dispute, which the music industry claims is to "help" artists, is actually doing exactly the opposite.

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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.

Several years ago, when I put together the Illegal Art Exhibit, Craig Baldwin turned me on to "Uso Justo," a short film by Coleman Miller, and it was always one of my favorites in the show. Miller took a vintage Mexican melodrama and, by writing his own subtitles, turned it into an experimental film that it itself a sort of meta-commentary on experimental film. A terribly funny one at that.

Vimeo and Blip TV have the full thing. As far as I know, a higher res version is available only via Mr. Miller himself.

What the look at left says, according to a Comic-Con facial analysis essay at trueslant.com: "How am I going to get from the Burn Notice panel discussion, which ends at 3:30 p.m. and features my man Bruce Campbell, to the can't-miss Q+A with James Cameron about Avatar, which starts at 3 p.m.? Without a time machine, I mean? Sheer force of will, that's how. But hell, it would be pretty cool if I had a time machine." (thanks, coates)

carstene writes "Qualification rounds for the NASA Centennial Challenge Power beaming contest are underway at the Dryden Flight Research Center. The contest uses a scale model of a space elevator as a race track. Entrants must build a robot to climb a cable, suspended by helicopter, 1 km into the sky without any on board energy storage. The teams are using high power laser beams to transmit power from ground stations to photovoltaic arrays on the robots. If a team can accomplish this at 5 meters per second average speed then they could win up to 2 million dollars. One day this technology could be used to power rovers in shadowed areas of the moon or to recharge electric UAV's in-flight or even a space elevator in the far future. A blog of the event can be found here. Full disclosure: I'm a member of the LaserMotive team that you can follow on twitter, or or via blog."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

According to Bizarre magazine, this two-year-old from China is said to smoke a pack a day.

His father first gave him fags at the age of 18 months to help cope with pain from a hernia.

Two-year-old has a pack a day habit (Via Dangerous Minds)

Diana Eng, our all-time favorite contestant on Project Runway, is writing a series of how-to articles for Make Online about HAM radio, which is one of her passions.

My favorite ham activity is making contacts via satellites. Not only is there the romantic notion of sending messages into outer space, but you have to trace the orbit of the satellite with your antenna while tuning the radio, to compensate for the Doppler effect.

The satellites AO-51, SO-50, and AO-27 orbit the Earth acting as repeaters. Repeaters are automated relay stations that allow hams to send signals over a greater distance using low-power hand held transceivers. The satellites allow hams to relay messages from Earth to space and back to other hams somewhere on the planet. The International Space Station (ISS) also has a repeater, but occasionally, if you're lucky, the astronauts turn on their radios to make contact directly with hams on the ground.

The following instructions will get you started listening to birds (satellites) on FM, which can be done with a simple VHF/UHF FM radio with a whip antenna, without the need of a ham license. For better coverage, you can use a Yagi antenna (like the one pictured above) connected to a mutli-mode radio and a license (if you want to transmit). A Yagi antenna can also be used to improve the signal of your hand held radio.

Catching satellites on ham radio

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.

You could burn most every guide to parenting babies and the world would suffer no great loss, but, as the mother of a one-year-old, I feel compelled to endorse a few standout pieces of writing that have helped me survive babycare.

First, Jeff Vogel's diary of raising his daughter Cordelia, as an infant, then toddler.

I watched TV, peacefully, with Cordelia lying on the couch next to me. She made some mildly fussy noises, so I picked her up, took her into the nursery, and checked her diaper. I then found that she had shat out, conservatively, 70% of her body weight. The waste product flowed around the diaper like the wind passes by a stick. I had to cross myself. It was majestic... I am almost positive that she can unhinge her hip bones.

Second: this bit of fiction by the late, great postmodern writer Donald Barthelme:

The first thing the baby did wrong was to tear pages out of her books. So we made a rule that each time she tore a page out of a book she had to stay alone in her room for four hours, behind the closed door. She was tearing out about a page a day, in the beginning, and the rule worked fairly well, although the crying and screaming from behind the closed door were unnerving...

Finally, Tom Scocca's "Underparenting" column at theawl.com is excellent.

(via Daniel Radosh, Daddytypes)

I love landing on various industrial designers' websites and seeing their creativity and thought processes at work. Freelance designer Shay Shafranek has a number of inspiring designs on his site, everything from electronic rulers to flower vase designs to expandable cardboard breadboxes to inline skate motor-assists.

Shay Shafranek

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This St Paul, MN wedding party had way too much fun choreographing a massive dance-number entrance. Be sure to watch until the bride appears, at least!

JK Wedding Entrance Dance (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)

eldavojohn writes "Four hundred thousand rare, out of print books may soon be available for purchase ranging anywhere from $10 to $45 apiece. The article lists a rare Florence Nightingale book on Nursing which normally sells for thousands due to its rarity. The [University of Michigan] librarian, Mr. Courant said, 'The agreement enables us to increase access to public domain books and other publications that have been digitised. We are very excited to be offering this service as a new way to increase access to the rich collections of the university library.' The University of Michigan has a library where Google is scanning rare books and was the aim of heavy criticism. (Some of the Google-scanned books are to be sold on Amazon.) How the authors guild and publishers react to Amazon's Surge offering softcover reprints of out of print books remains to be seen."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Update to the story about the Oklahoma Highway Patrol Trooper who was more interested in choking a paramedic than he was in the condition of the patient in the ambulance. Trooper Daniel Martin was suspended for five days and ordered to "anger assessment."

From J.D. Tuccille's Civil Liberties Examiner site:

"Anger assessment" is that greatest of meaningless institutional butt-coverings. It allows organizational higher-ups to tell the lawyers that they're doing something without actually doing something. It's nonsense.

What needs to be assessed in a police officer who was fired in 2000 as Chief of Police in Fairfax, Oklahoma, for violent and bullying behavior, and who then endangers a patient in an ambulance and picks a fight while in uniform?

Daniel Martin was out of line, acting like a cartoon cop outraged that somebody didn't "respect mah authoritah." While letting his bruised ego run wild, he behaved unprofessionally and, potentially, put a life at risk.

Five days without pay and a bit of psychobabble are an awfully light slap on the wrist for that sort of misconduct.

Slap on the wrist for cop who assaulted paramedic

Brett from ChiZine publishing sez,

We're launching FIVE books at WorldCon in Montreal this August.

* The Tel Aviv Dossier by Lavie Tidhar & Nir Yaniv
* The Choir Boats by Daniel A. Rabuzzi
* Objects of Worship by Claude Lalumiere
* Monstrous Affections by David Nickle
* The World More Full of Weeping by Robert J. Wiersema

This is an open party and everyone is welcome to come on by, meet the authors, get your books signed, and learn what's next for CZP.

Also in attendance will be Robert Boyczuk, author of Horror Story and Other Horror Stories; Deborah A. Mills, illustrator for The Choir Boats; CZP staff Brett Alexander Savory, Sandra Kasturi, and Matthew Moore. We'll have copies of all CZP titles available for sale. PLEASE NOTE: The books we're launching will not be publicly available until later in the fall and we're making them specially available for WorldCon attendees!

WHEN: Saturday, August 8th, 2009 @ 7:30
WHERE: Maisonette Suite 2802
Delta Hotel Centre-Ville 777 University Street Montreal, QC

CZP launching five books at WorldCon! (Thanks, Brett

You may have heard that some miscreant somehow surreptitiously filmed well-known ESPN sportscaster Erin Andrews naked in her hotel room using some sort of pinhole spy camera installed the room. Obviously, this was incredibly illegal (apparently, the suspicion is that it was an insider at ESPN who knew which room she was in) and hopefully the person/people responsible are caught and punished. However, CitMediaLaw points out that some legal analysts are apparently claiming that it's criminal just to watch the video. But, that's not true. It makes you a terrible person, but it's not illegal. After talking about how a talking head legal analyst on CBS claimed it was illegal to watch the video, Carlos Miller checked in with a First Amendment lawyer who balanced the questions clearly:

According to Photography is Not a Crime's legal analyst Marc Randazza (yes, I have a few, so take that, CBS), Bloom is talking out of her ass.

"That CBS analyst needs more legal education and less melodrama," the Florida First Amendment attorney said in an email responding to my question.

He also added that although it is completely legal to download and view the video, he didn't have much respect for anybody who would.

"Anyone who does download it is kind of an asshole," he said. "She did have an expectation of privacy. We live in a society where the sleazes and the lowest common denominator individuals seem to thrive. If we dried up their mud flats, they would die off.

"What I mean by that is that downloading the video is legal. but doing so is a douchebag move. I certainly won't be downloading it (although I personally would love to see her naked too)."

As if to prove the point, apparently, the NY Post posted still images from the video -- and ESPN has responded by banning NY Post writers from ESPN. The Post didn't break the law, but that doesn't make it any less evil a move.

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Place an olive pit in the discard dish before the guest arrive.

Behavioral Economics 101: Dinner Party Application

christian.einfeldt writes "Alan Lord, a FOSS computer consultant based in the UK, has announced that Amazon UK honored his request for a refund of the Microsoft license fee portion of the cost of a new Asus netbook PC that came with Microsoft Windows XP. Lord details the steps that he took to obtain a refund of 40.00 GBP for the cost of the EULA, complete with links to click to request a refund. Lord's refund comes 10 years after the initial flurry of activity surrounding EULA discounts, started by a blog post by Australian computer consultant Geoffrey Bennett which appeared on Slashdot on 18 January 1999. That Slashdot story led to mainstream press coverage, such as stories in CNN, the New York Times Online, and the San Francisco Chronicle, to name just a few. The issue quieted down for a few years, but has started to gain some momentum again in recent years, with judges in France, Italy, and Israel awarding refunds. But if Lord's experience is any indication, getting a refund through Amazon might be as easy as filling out a few forms, at least in the UK, without any need to go to court."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An Anonymous Reader writes "The human body literally glows, emitting a visible light in extremely small quantities at levels that rise and fall with the day, scientists now reveal. Japanese researchers have shown that the body emits visible light, 1,000 times less intense than the levels to which our naked eyes are sensitive. In fact, virtually all living creatures emit very weak light, which is thought to be a byproduct of biochemical reactions involving free radicals."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

wandazulu writes "At the end of an article written by the creator of C++, where he talks about removing a feature from the new C++ standard, he drops a bombshell: The new C++ standard (typically referred to as C++0x) has been delayed until 2010 or later. What does this mean? No new C++ features like threads, proper enum classes, or hash tables. C++0x is dead, long live C++1x!"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

For quite some time, we've been calling out recording industry insiders and their ridiculous stats concerning "losses" from piracy and the like. The most common pattern is to not count where displaced money goes, and if it still benefits the industry. So, for example, many studies would count every downloaded copy as a "lost sale," but would never take into account if that download resulted in the downloader deciding to go to a show and shell out a bunch more cash on merchandise. We're not saying that always happens, but most of the industry studies would only count data that supported their basic premise that the music industry was in trouble and "something must be done." That's highly misleading -- especially when such numbers are then used to make policy.

So consider me a bit surprised to see the following report (thanks Ian) out of the UK, from PRS's economists, Will Page and Chris Carey, where they try to look more closely at the real numbers and conclude that for all the whining and complaining, the UK music industry is actually growing (warning:pdf).

Let me repeat that: despite all of the whining and complaining about the state of the music industry, some of the music industry's own economists are admitting that the market is growing.

Not surprisingly, it found that retail product sales have declined, but the other parts of the industry have grown noticeably more than the decline in retail sales. This growth has come from a few sources. Live show attendance has increased more than retail sales have decreased. Consumers have actually spent more. On top of that, the business to business side of the industry (sponsorships, licensing, advertisements, etc.) has grown as well, opening up new and lucrative means of making money.

Admittedly, there are some facts that could potentially temper the results: including claims of the rather uneven distribution of live revenue (big acts get a lot, others perhaps not as much) and worries that without enough support for smaller acts they won't ever be able to get big enough to make that kind of revenue. So, the fear is that it's all just "legacy acts" that are touring and making money, rather than new acts being encouraged the to get big. This is a charge some others have raised in the past, and it certainly bears watching, though I believe, pretty strongly, that it's an issue that works itself out as various additional business models get developed.

Still, it's quite amazing to see that a music industry study (even one from a non-profit like PRS) actually admits that the overall industry is actually growing.

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Someone put a land mine in a Goodwill donation box at an Arvada, Colorado strip mall. A bomb squad dealt with the mine; it's unknown whether it was live or not. According to the Associated Press, the package, a "rectangular, olive-green box with the words 'Front Toward Enemy'" worried Goodwill workers when they saw it. "Land mine left in Goodwill donation box"

UPDATE: In the comments, folks have correctly identified the device as a Claymore Antipersonnel Mine.

I just stumbled on an answer to Tuesday's Dumb XML Question.

If you recall, I wanted to provide a way for users to view the XML of a feed that contains a <cloud> element. I didn't want them to have to do anything like View Source, for a simple reason. I wanted to make it one-click to refresh, so you could quickly see the effect of a change on the XML. I really missed this from the days before the browser vendors hacked up the viewing of RSS in the browser.

Here's what I did...

1. Add a button to the LifeLiner editing window called View.

2. When the user clicks it, I read the feed XML from the server.

3. Write it out to the local file system with the name preview.xml. Turns out the extension is significant.

4. Send the OS an openDocument message.

5. Voila -- you see the XML as God intended.

Let's hope they don't "fix" this. :-)

Matt_dk writes "Armadillo Aerospace conducted two groundbreaking atmospheric test flights this weekend with their 'Mod' vertical-takeoff-vertical-landing rocket, a vehicle familiar to anyone who has followed NASA's Lunar Lander Challenge competitions. Flying from their test facility in Caddo Mills, Texas, Armadillo Aerospace first completed a milestone flight under a NASA contract, using methane fuel and liquid oxygen as propellant. Later that same afternoon, a second successful low-altitude flight was performed using a 'boosted hop' trajectory of the same type that will be used for suborbital flights to space."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Over at Morbid Anatomy, Joanna just posted her lovely photos of the Museum Boerhaave in Leiden, NL. It's the country's National Museum of the History of Science and Medicine, and houses a legendary permanent collection of curiosities dating back several centuries. Above: Bernardus Siegfried Albinus Case in anatomy hall. All preparations by Albinus, Circa 1730. "The Magnificent Collection of the Museum Boerhaave, Leiden"

schliz writes "Developers of The Pirate Bay have launched their new Virtual Private Network (VPN) service to some 180,000 pre-registered beta testers. An e-mail to beta testers read. 'IPREDator does not store any personal details about its clients. IPREDator does not store any traffic habits you might have. IPREDator is the key to a free internet in the renaissance of censorship!' The new service was launched to protect file sharers in response to the Swedish Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive (IPRED) that went into effect in April."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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. He lives in Los Angeles, where he is a tinkerer and artist 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.

I gave an arcade game-making lecture at Machine Project while ago, and as a joke I made some images of what I thought were wildly unlikely video game subjects:



And then, a few weeks later, I saw this:



Wow. Grey's Anatomy, the video game? That would be like if there was a Trapper John, MD video game back in the 80s. Maybe it's because I haven't really watched that show, but it's hard to wrap my head around how something like this would work. Do you shake the Wiimote to... have relationship problems? Push the B button to trigger self-doubt about your abilities as a doctor?

I honestly had to double check the date on this story, because it sounds like something we heard seven years ago about the US Secret Service doing wardriving and alerting open WiFi router owners that their WiFi was open. That was back when there were all sorts of stories about how "evil" it was to have open WiFi, which seems to have finally (thankfully) gone away for the most part. However, Broadband Reports points us to the news that police in Australia are going to start "wardriving" and seeking open WiFi networks in order to knock on your door and tell you to lock them down. They don't seem to note that having an open WiFi network is legal if you want it to be open. Perhaps it's a nice thing to do to alert people who might not know, but it seems like police resources could be spent in a more useful manner.

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Rex Research is a great site, chock-full of info about wacky inventions that never made it, including a bunch of free-energy quackery and pseudoscience that's still a lot of fun if you take it with a grain of salt. One of my favorite pages so far is this collection of weird-ass boats that folks have made. Highlights include a boat with tank-like treads, a submarine that swims like a fish, and an active-wave-cancellation system for aircraft carriers.

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An article I wrote for the New York Times Magazine about men in Japan who are in love with anime characters is online now. The print version will be in this coming Sunday's magazine. I should point out that this phenomenon is not unique to Japan, or to men, but I think it's safe to say that that is where it originated. In the interest of space the editors and I had to cut out the sections about 2D love in the US and elsewhere, and among women.

Nisan didn't mean to fall in love with Nemutan. Their first encounter -- at a comic-book convention that Nisan's gaming friends dragged him to in Tokyo -- was serendipitous. Nisan was wandering aimlessly around the crowded exhibition hall when he suddenly found himself staring into Nemutan's bright blue eyes. In the beginning, they were just friends. Then, when Nisan got his driver's license a few months later, he invited Nemutan for a ride around town in his beat-up Toyota. They went to a beach, not far from the home he shares with his parents in a suburb of Tokyo. It was the first of many road trips they would take together. As they got to know each other, they traveled hundreds of miles west -- to Kyoto, Osaka and Nara, sleeping in his car or crashing on friends' couches to save money. They took touristy pictures under cherry trees, frolicked like children on merry-go-rounds and slurped noodles on street corners. Now, after three years together, they are virtually inseparable. "I've experienced so many amazing things because of her," Nisan told me, rubbing Nemutan's leg warmly. "She has really changed my life." Nemutan doesn't really have a leg. She's a stuffed pillowcase -- a 2-D depiction of a character, Nemu, from an X-rated version of a PC video game called Da Capo, printed on synthetic fabric. In the game, which is less a game than an interactive visual novel about a schoolyard romance, Nemu is the loudmouthed little sister of the main character, whom she calls nisan, or "big brother," a nickname Nisan adopted as his own when he met Nemu. When I joined the couple for lunch at their favorite all-you-can-eat salad bar in the Tokyo suburb of Hachioji, he insisted on being called only by this new nickname, addressing his body-pillow girlfriend using the suffix "tan" to show how much he adored her. Nemutan is 10, maybe 12 years old and wears a little blue bikini and gold ribbons in her hair. Nisan knows she's not real, but that hasn't stopped him from loving her just the same. "Of course she's my girlfriend," he said, widening his eyes as if shocked by the question. "I have real feelings for her."

Love in 2D [New York Times Magazine]

The Play This Thing blog reviews Ginormo Sword, a sarcastic Flash game that's designed to reduce the dopamine drip of your basic video game to its bare minimum:

Ginormo is just as succinct with the gameplay; if you found pressing WASD to move and clicking like a spastic chimp a tad too hard to manage don't fret, as Ginormo Sword further simplifies the controls to just the mouse. Combat is equally as minimalistic and thankfully void of challenge; click to attack and don't be careless enough to walk into your enemies to win. Each enemy you kill drops gold, which of course can be used to buy said loot. Slay mobs, get loot, repeat ad infinitum. You're most likely accustomed to this from your days of Pavlovian conditioning in Azeroth. Once you tire of this, wander around your static environment till you stumble upon another spawning ground of enemies...

Srsly, this game is in the vein of Upgrade Complete or Achievement Unlocked, and is a great meta-commentary on the whole MMO scene and the shallow and one-dimensional gameplay behind it. Strip away the chatroom and all of the other bells and whistles from your MMO and you're left with Ginormo Sword and its lifeless and hollow gameplay

Ginormo Sword

Vigile writes "When Intel's consumer line of solid state drives were first introduced late in 2008, they impressed reviewers with their performance and reliability. Intel gained a lot of community respect by addressing some performance degradation issues found at PC Perspective by quickly releasing an updated firmware that solved those problems and then some. Now Intel has its second generation of X25-M drives available, designated by a "G2" in the model name. The SSDs are technically very similar though they use 34nm flash rather than the 50nm flash used in the originals and reduced latency times. What is really going to set these new drives apart though, both from the previous Intel offerings and their competition, are the much lower prices allowed by the increased memory density. PC Perspective has posted a full review and breakdown of the new product line that should be available next week."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Clearly the machine knows something we Californians do not. Boing Boing reader Adam Heitzman sends in this iPhone snapshot and says,

Here's a comical sign of the Econopocalypse. It's a picture of a Chase ATM in Sacramento telling me "Registered warrants issued by the state of California are not accepted."

Registered warrants are IOUs. California is/was something like the 6th largest economy in the world and the bank is saying "cash only, thanks, NEXT!"

And in the state capital, no less. [shakes head with sense of foreboding doom].

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. He lives in Los Angeles, where he is a tinkerer and artist 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.

Usually when we look back with smug amusement at technology from the past, the size-related thing that makes us chuckle is how large everything was. The old cellphones that were like holding a lunchbox to your face, the Walkmen that were like carry-on bags-- but we shouldn't forget the joy that comes from laughing at things that now seem too small.

This came from a 1977 ad for wood panelling, so perhaps they didn't want to obscure any of that glorious, golden wood. But still, I certainly remember having TVs that now would be barely considered adequate for car-headrest use as the main TV in a house. We get spoiled pretty quickly, and there's no going back. Just for comparison's sake, here's how an average-sized HDTV (42") would fit in the scene: This ad also doesn't do anything to dispel the idea that the only colors we had in abundance in the 70s were browns and the occasional orange. And would it kill them to give Fisty on the right there a chair? And doesn't the left-hand head-smacker look kind of like Steve Martin?

This video from the awesome British toy store Grand Illusions demonstrates a cool collapsing mechanism, which involves only paper and elastic bands, and allows a rigid display to be set up in about a second and easily folded away again for storage. The French company that makes these is called Marin's. (Beware, their site is flash-based.)

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This gorgeus astro-soap-bubble is a freaky nebula discovered last July by Dave Jurasevich of the Mount Wilson Observatory in California, who called it the "Cygnus Bubble." New Scientist has the explanation, courtesy of Adam Frank of the University of Rochester: "'Spherical ones are very rare.' One explanation is that the image is looking down the throat of a typical cylindrical nebula. However, it is still remarkably symmetrical, Frank says."

Giant 'soap bubble' found floating in space

(Image: Travis A. Rector/U of Alaska Anchorage/Heidi Schweiker/NOAO)

Animator David O'Reilly (Twitter), whose work I've featured on Boing Boing's original video program many times, has created this lovely music video for a little-known band from Ireland called "You Too." What's that? Oh I've been corrected, "U2." I think this great little video will really help them get somewhere and make a name for themselves! The song is "I'll Go Crazy If I Don't Go Crazy Tonight."

Neil H. writes "The Augustine Commission, commissioned by the White House and NASA to provide an independent review of the current US human spaceflight program and potential new directions, is seeking public input on a document describing the preliminary beyond-LEO exploration scenarios they're analyzing. The destination-based scenarios, designed with NASA's current budget in mind, range from a Lunar Base (essentially NASA's current plan), to "Mars First" (human exploration of Mars ASAP), to "Flexible Path" (initially focused on several destinations in shallow gravity wells, such as Lagrange points, near-Earth asteroids, and the Martian moon Phobos). The Commission is also seeking input on the issues of engaging commercial spaceflight, in-space refueling, and coordinating human and robotic exploration."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

So, we just had the story of police in the UK trying to abuse copyright to prevent the showing of speed camera photos. Now we've got a somewhat similar story in the US, pointed to us by Michael Scott, involving officials in Alaska using copyright to try to force offline photos of "aerial wolf kills." Apparently, the Alaskan gov't goes around and shoots wolves from helicopters to control the wolf population. Not surprisingly, some find this rather distasteful. One wildlife protection group obtained the government's photos of killed wolves from March of this year using a public records request, and put them online... at which point the gov't claimed that it was a copyright violation.

This seems questionable on a variety of fronts. In the US, we tend to have problems with the idea that gov't should copyright things. The federal gov't can't, though state gov'ts often have more leeway and often do claim copyright over documents (though, it can be controversial). More importantly, though, once again, this is clearly not the intention of copyright. It's quite obviously copyright law being used (yet again) to stifle free expression from protesters -- a form of free speech which should trump copyright law absolutely. Of course, in the end, like so many attempts to stifle speech, this is backfiring. The effort to suppress the photos is only serving to draw much more attention to them.

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Diesel's new charmingly named Super Bad Ass Collection of giant, multi-dial watches is a spear of desiderata aimed straight at my heart. Must. Not. Buy. More. Watches.

Diesel Super Bad Ass Collection (Thanks, <a href="Mitch!)

XenonJohn recreates a portable audio player from an alternate timeline -

This is an admittedly mad project to see what might have happened if Sony had invented the Walkman earlier than they did - and made it so it took 8 track tape cartridges (which came before cassette tapes were invented).

In other words, can I make a personal 8 track player with just headphones in the style of a Walkman?
How small can I make it? Bear in mind it needs quite a bit of power to move the tape loop around inside the cartridge.

Indeed the 7 rechargeable batteries used add some bulk, but it's certainly a unique portable player! Check out the how-to plus some interesting retro-tech info in the instructable.

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A new show of the art of Basil Wolverton is hanging in New York's Barbara Gladstone Gallery (515 West 24th Street, Chelsea; (212) 206-9300) until Aug 14. The New York Times has a nice potted history (with slideshow) of MAD Magazine's grossest and funniest illustrator to accompany the show.

The Wolverton material best suited to a general audience, though, may be his Bible illustrations, which he was doing in the 1950s and '60s, concurrently with his early Mad work. In 1941 he had become a member of a Protestant sect called the Radio Church of God, later the Worldwide Church of God. He was ordained as an elder in 1943, and as his contribution to the sect he illustrated some of its apocalyptically minded publications, as well as the biblical account of the earth's final days.

Several of his end-of-the-world pictures are in the show, and they're wild. Plagues descend on the sin-ridden human race. Bodies break out in disfiguring boils. Faces burn, shrivel and stretch into masks of fear. In this context even the ultra-bonkers cartoons Wolverton did in the 1960s and '70s for the post-underground Gjdrkzlxcbwq Comics and DC Comics make sense.

The van Gogh of the Gross-Out

Slideshow: The Michelangelo of Mad Magazine

(Thanks, Ben!)

My latest Internet Evolution feature proposes that the best way for schools to protect their students on the Internet is to assign them curriculum that asks students to investigate all the ways that the school's censorware sucks -- blocks useful material, easily circumvented by students, interferes with teachers, invades privacy and enriches sleazy censorware companies. By systematically approaching the efficacy of censorware, students learn statistics, critical thinking, research skills, civics, and the scientific method -- and they help to expose the worse-than-useless solution represented by using censorware on school networks.

Let's start by admitting that censorware doesn't work. It catches vast amounts of legitimate material, interfering with teachers' lesson planning and students' research alike.

Censorware also allows enormous amounts of bad stuff through, from malware to porn. There simply aren't enough prudes in the vast censorware boiler-rooms to accurately classify every document on the Web.

Worst of all, censorware teaches kids that the normal course of online life involves being spied upon for every click, tweet, email, and IM.

These are the same kids who we're desperately trying to warn away from disclosing personal information and compromising photos on social networks. They understand that actions speak louder than words: If you wiretap every student in the school and punish those who try to get out from under the all-seeing eye, you're saying "Privacy is worthless."

After you've done that, there's no amount of admonishments to value your privacy that can make up for it.

Beyond Censorware: Teaching Web Literacy

ozmanjusri writes "While Microsoft presented its recent embrace of the GPL as 'a break from the ordinary,' and the press spoke of them as going to great lengths to engage the open source community,' as is often the case with Microsoft, it turns out they had an ulterior motive. According to Stephen Hemminger, an engineer with Vyatta, Microsoft's Hyper-V used open-source components in a network driver and the company released the code to avoid legal action over a GPL violation. Microsoft's decision to embrace the GPL was welcomed by many in the open source community, but their failure to honestly explain the reason behind the release will have squandered this opportunity to build trust, something which is sadly lacking in most people's dealings with Microsoft."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

ozmanjusri writes "While Microsoft presented its recent embrace of the GPL as "a break from the ordinary", and the press spoke of them as going "to great lengths to engage the open source community", as is often the case with Microsoft, it turns out they had an ulterior motive. According to Stephen Hemminger, an engineer with Vyatta, Microsoft's Hyper-V used open-source components in a network driver and the company released the code to avoid legal action over a GPL violation. Microsoft's decision to embrace the GPL was welcomed by many in the open source community, but their failure to honestly explain the reason behind the release will have squandered this opportunity to build trust, something which is sadly lacking in most people's dealings with Microsoft."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I have a cloud server running now.

I have feeds that are connected with the cloud and more on the way. I have an aggregator that is wired into the cloud.

Now, if you're a developer of a Twitter authoring tool or want to start a small community of your own (emphasis on small), it's time to start at least thinking about your role in the bootstrap.

Here's the new implementor's guide, first cut:

http://rsscloud.org/walkthrough.html

We need implementations in all environments. My code runs in the OPML Editor. We need everything else.

Dean from the Participatory Culture Foundation sez, "Miro, the free and open source internet TV application, got a nifty update today! Improvements in Miro 2.5 include: speedier performance, audio podcasts, interface polish, and lots of tweaks. The mission behind Miro, as well as its non-profit developer the Participatory Culture Foundation, is to decentralize and fully democratize television as it moves online. Miro connects viewers and creators more directly, moves open standards forward, and is built on a solid foundation of free and open source software."

Get Miro 2.5 (Thanks, Dean!)

(Disclosure: I am proud to serve as a volunteer on the Board of the nonprofit Participatory Culture Foundation, which publishes Miro)

John Graham-Cumming's The Geek Atlas: 128 Places Where Science and Technology Come Alive is a geek initiation in 505 pages. Identifying 128 sites of nerdy interest (with strong clusters in the UK and US), the Atlas could also be called 2^7 places to go and have your mind blown before you die.

From Charles Babbage's pickled brain (Royal College of Surgeons Hunterian Museum, London) to the lockpickers' paradise at the John M Mossman Lock Collection in NYC to place to see the prime-number-oriented magicicadas spawn to the Magnetic North Pole, the Atlas covers a gamut from the historical to the wondrous. It even takes note of some of my local haunts, including the wonderful, solemn and beautiful Bunhill Cemetery, resting place of Thomas "Bayesian filtering" Bayes and his patron, Richard Price, the inventor of actuary. It does a particularly good job on Bletchley Park, site of Alan Turing and co's codebreaking efforts during WWII (part of the proceeds from each Atlas sold go to fund restoration efforts at Bletchley, which is sadly neglected by the British government).

Each site in the Atlas is accompanied by a sprightly and well-explained lesson in history, science and technology, from the functioning of diesel, two-stroke and four-stroke engines to the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum theory to the way that antibiotics work to the basis for the Davy lamp.

Whether you're off on a trip or just want to do some armchair exploring and learning, the Geek Atlas is a wonderful piece of reading, and an education besides.

The Geek Atlas: 128 Places Where Science and Technology Come Alive (Amazon)

The Geek Atlas (author's site)

Publisher of Geek's Atlas to help save Bletchley Park

Back in December, we posted a piece about Lucas, a six-year-old who'd learned how to solder and made a battery-powered guitar amp for his grandmother for Christmas. Six might be a little young for most kids to handle a soldering iron, but each person is obviously different (and you likely know what your kids can/cannot handle).

At one of the Maker Faires, a kid asked me if he could build the Solarbotics Herbie that'd he'd just bought in the Maker Shed, as I made up some Mousey the Junkbots. He was maybe 9. He'd never soldered, he was fidgety, and he kept nearly dropping the iron, nearly burning himself, soldering-desoldering-resoldering bad welds -- I was on pins and needles the whole time. He finished the bot a lot faster than I'd finished my first Herbie. He put in a battery, turned it on, and it took off with a shot. It worked! I was stunned. He'd built his faster than I had and I'd had to resolder at least one connection and futz with my whiskers. So, never underestimate kids.

At the same time, be reasonable, use common sense, and BE SAFE. When we posted Lucas' project the first time, readers were quick to correctly point out that it was a big no-no to have a 6-year-old (or maker of any age) soldering without safety glasses on. His dad admitted it was foolish -- no excuses. And Lucas did get a nasty little iron burn, which he shows off in one of the pics in the Flickr set. Such burns do come with the territory, at any age.

Six year old with a soldering iron

More:

• Camp counselor Dave's soldering tips
• Solarbotics' soldering summary
• Toolbox: Soldering tool, Part 2
• Toolbox: Soldering essentials, Part 1
• MAKEcation: "Teach Your Family to Solder" week
• Let's take a Summer MAKEcation!

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Michael Geist sez,

The Canadian government has just launched the first public consultation on copyright since 2001. The consultation represents both a crucial opportunity and a potential threat. While Canadians can ensure that the government understands that copyright matters and that a balance is needed, some groups will undoubtedly use the consultation to push for a return of a Canadian DMCA like Bill C-61. The recording industry has already said that bill did not go far enough. That means we could see pressure for a Canadian DMCA, a three-strikes and you're out process, and the extension of the term of copyright to eat into the public domain.

To help facilitate greater participation throughout the consultation process, I have launched SpeakOutOnCopyright.ca. The site features dozens of posts and videos on Canadian copyright law, the Twitter #copycon stream, information on Bill C-61, and a Take Action page that highlights the ways individual Canadians can speak out on copyright.

Speak Out On Copyright (Thanks, Michael!)

snydeq writes "InfoWorld provides a reality check on the impact cloud computing will have on IT jobs, the overall effects of which will likely resemble those of outsourcing, automation, and utility computing — in other words, a movement away from the nuts and bolts of technology toward the business end of the organization. This shift from 'blue-collar IT to white-collar IT' will be accompanied by greater demand for IT pros experienced with virtualization and Web scale-out deployments, even among midlevel organizations, and greater emphasis on SaaS integration among in-house development teams, analysts say. And though the large-scale impact of 'cloud-sourcing' is likely a decade away, those not versed in vendor contract management, cloud integration, analytics, and RIA and mobile development may find themselves pushed toward the less technical jobs to come, those that will require days full of conference calls and putting out fires caused by doing business in the cloud."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It's amazing how badly some people misunderstand the First Amendment. It only limits the government from passing laws that limit your free expression (with certain exceptions). It has nothing to do with what a private company or individual can do. In other words, it's not a right to say whatever you want with no consequence. So, I doubt that the following lawsuit will get very far. Apparently a video gamer is suing Sony saying it violated his First Amendment rights by banning him from the PlayStation 3 game "Resistance" for something he apparently said while talking to other players (found via Digg). But, of course, as a private company and not the government, Sony has every right to ban whoever they want, for a wide variety of reasons. So, kids, remember, the First Amendment isn't a right to say whatever you want without getting kicked off of a video game system for being annoying.

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Recently on Offworld the first bits of games news have started to trickle in from Comic-Con, as Alien Hominid creators The Behemoth announce that their Xbox Live Arcade hit Castle Crashers is coming to the PlayStation 3, as they also show off more videos of the chaotic-cuteness of their upcoming multiplayer party Game 3 (with a retro-lounge soundtrack by Combustible Edison). We also saw the developers at Maxis open their game even wider and include the ability to export your Spore creature to Maya or any Collada-supporting 3D package (above), fully mapped and posable, to do with it what you will, saw Evil Dead director Sam Raimi tapped to make a World of Warcraft movie, and saw Cartoon Network series Metalocalypse coming to PSN and XBLA courtesy developer Frozen Codebase. Then we wrapped up a very musical Wednesday with yet another chiptune tribute album on the horizon, this time 8-bit covers of The Prodigy, listened to cancer charity CD Songs for the Cure including tracks by World of Goo creator Kyle Gabler, and, best of all, discovered a new, free EP by local favorite low-tech shoegaze band Tree Wave. And finally: a NES made of paper and James Kay's papercraft Game Boy bird, and our 'one shot's for the day: Commander Video's glitch ritual, and a gorgeous tribute to Chrono Trigger.

First a couple of upfronts.

1. I love The Wire. It's the best TV series ever. I've paid for it twice, once on HBO and once on DVD. So I not only believe in paying for content I love, I practice it. Redundantly!

2. I'm drinking coffee. There's no spittle in the corner of my mouth. Writing about something I've spent my whole career working on and thinking about. And I'm no kid. I'm five years older than David Simon, former Baltimore Sun journo and co-writer of The Wire.

Simon wrote a remarkable piece in the Columbia Journalism Review, saying that the NY Times and Washington Post must charge for their work the way HBO charges for shows like The Wire.

With all due respect, putting up a "pay wall" is exactly what these organizations don't need. They need to decentralize, get further out into the world, not hole-up behind a wall and try to tough it out.

What worked for HBO won't work for the news because HBO is ficition, and news is not. You can take years writing and developing a story on HBO, polish it, cut out parts that don't support the plot you've devised, even drop the series in the middle if you lose interest. That doesn't happen with the news. News is happening all the time, on its own schedule, all over the place, including many places you don't have reporters. (Think about the arrest of Prof Gates in his own house in Cambridge, this week. Sounds like something that would happen on The Wire.)

And often, the stories are far more complex than reporters can comprehend. This is something I know many people in the news business disagree with. I just don't think the reporter model is working. All it does is inflate the self-importance of these people, turn them into gatekeepers, and often bullies. People who behave like the power brokers they're supposedly covering, when they're forced into playing footsie with them if they want access. Usually under the table but sometimes in plain sight.

As of user of news, I'm sure the future is in shortening the distance between the sources and the readers. Yes, there was a time when, if you wanted to get a story on the wire you had to call a reporter. But that's less true every year, as new channels of news have developed, channels that the NYT (not so much the Post) are just starting to participate in. Watch out as that develops, because it's a potent combination. News people immersed in a sea of news makers. I don't know what news will look like coming out the other end, but it won't look like the system Simon and I grew up in.

This must run its course. The idea of putting up a paywall will just force more reporters outside of it if they want to do their jobs and shrink the publications further. It's no solution.

PS: I don't believe in citizen journalism, which has amateurs playing the role of reporters. I think news is being refactored, unbundled -- broken into components, much the same as other aggregators like travel agents and stock brokers. Music A&R people. I believe in the Sources Go Direct model, the disintermediation of journalism. I also think there's a need for aggregation, but it's a practice people like Simon often mock. In fact reporters base their work on generous people who contribute their knowledge for free -- sources.

netbuzz writes "A wiki operator who was pressured by Apple's legal team into removing anonymous discussions about circumventing the company's music-playback software for iPods and iPhones says he is relieved that Apple has backed off and he'll be able to restore the disputed material. Apple dropped its claims of copyright and DMCA violation against BluWiki only under legal pressure of its own in the form of a lawsuit by the Electronic Frontier Foundation."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In the last few months, we've noticed that collections societies around the world are getting desperate for any possible way to collect more money. It's really stunning just how many of these sorts of stories we've seen, all over the globe. It's as if all the collections societies got together and said "how can we squeeze more money out of absolutely anything -- even if it kills off the golden goose," and then set about putting that plan into action. From Australia to Sweden to the UK to the US to Germany, we get story after story after story of incredibly short-sighted collections societies either (a) pushing the gov't to allow them to extort charge larger fees to venues or (b) massively expanding what they consider to be a public performance that requires a royalty. These societies are taking an incredibly short-sighted view. They're causing more and more venues to stop playing music altogether, thus harming everyone.

Mr. Tunes alerts us to the fact that this is now happening in Canada as well, where a smaller collection society, the Neighbouring Rights Collective of Canada, is demanding massive increases in fees, as well as an expansion of what's covered. Of course, SOCAN, the Society of Composers, Authors and Music Publishers of Canada, already collects fees in Canada, but apparently these are different fees -- and they're much higher than SOCAN's. When that fact is pointed out to the NRCC person, his response is simply that SOCAN's rates were too low. Apparently, they'd rather shut venues down rather than have them help promote music. Brilliant.

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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.

Depending on your age, you may (consciously or not) hold the belief that, at some point in time, Rolling Stone magazine had some sort of political "edge." I know I did, until I came across this article (below) by Jann Wenner actively discouraging readers from taking part in the historic protests at the 1968 Democratic National Convention.

Wenner deplores the "recklessness and thorough lack of moral compunction that characterize" the protests organizers, the Yippies including Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman. The cops beat up protesters, he argues, so why would you want to go? Wenner also seems to resent the fact that the Yippies broke the rules of organized dissent and cleverly used media to their ends. They want to hold a press conference at the Hotel Roosevelt instead of a church because it plays better with reporters = outrage!

Wenner wrote:

"The spirit of rock and roll...or the new youth, whatever catch-all phrase may be used to denote this mood wants no part of today's social structure, especially in its most manifestly corrupt form, politics."

In other words, rock and politics don't mix. This, in the middle of the Vietnam War, one year before Woodstock would prove just how wrong Rolling Stone was.

For their part, the Yippies claimed that Wenner was bribed by Xerox magnate Max Palevsky (a Rolling Stone investor with ties to McGovern) to discourage participation in the protests. Evidence of this collusion, however, is scarce.

Looking to build a motorized POV display, UncleBone made use of a certain rotary mechanism he already had on hand -

Seeing so many persistence of vision ideas on the web was too tempting not to try one. After considering several different motors to drive a display, a ceiling fan seemed to run at just the right speed, is out of the way, and very quiet compared with alternatives. With a micro controller based on the Arduino, this project provided plenty of both software and hardware learning and besides, the kids were involved throughout...

PCB, souce code, plus the Excel doc used to generate the display sequences are all available on Step 12 of the project's instructable.


More:

LED art fan

In the Maker Shed:

MiniPOV kit

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angry tapir writes "Mobile Operator Tata Teleservices is testing technology that allows farmers to use their mobile phones to remotely monitor and switch on irrigation pump sets in far flung locations. The technology, called Nano Ganesh, is being tested in two villages in the Indian state of Gujarat. In India, where the electricity supply is erratic, farmers often walk several kilometers to where their irrigation pumps are located, only to find that there is no electricity available. By dialing a code number from a mobile phone to a wireless device attached to the pump, farmers can now remotely monitor the electricity supply, and also switch the pump on and off. It's just the latest example of how mobile phone technology is being employed in novel ways to solve problems in developing nations. For example in Kenya, GSM technology has been used to help tame marauding elephants."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

RJ sez, "Poor old Lonesome George, the last remaining living example of the Galapagos Pinta turtle looks set to finally become a dad at the ripe old age of almost one hundred (no one is sure exactly how old he is). This follows a false start last year when the suddenly horny George and his two Hispanola (the closest relative to the Pinta) lady companions produced around a dozen eggs that unfortunately did not incubate. Like any young couple(s) trying for kids, they didn't let this false start deter them and it looks very much as if the five eggs they have produced this year may well hatch. Fingers crossed!"

Lonesome George to Finally be a Father?

(Image: Lonesome George 2, a CC Attribution photo from Mike Weston's Flickr stream)

Riley Harmon sent us a link to this really simple kitchen island, made from "A baker's rack, a solid core door ripped in half, some pipe and flanges, a curtain rod, some casters, some stain, and a little elbow grease."

How To: Build an Island

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Alex took his camera out to photograph the demolition of a flyover (overpass) in Chatham, England. After refusing to give his identification to two plainclothes people who refused to identify themselves, he was arrested under Section 44 of the Terrorism Act (he did explain to the police and the mystery plainclothes people why he was there and what he had photographed, which is more than I would have done). The police officer put him in cuffs and led him down his town's main road and locked him in a police van. Once in the van, he was questioned about his views on terrorism. Later, a policewoman who said that he had caught her in one of his shots felt "intimidated" by him because he was tall (implying, I suppose, that he wouldn't have been arrested if he was shorter -- terrorists take note). Alex has complained to the police Professional Standards Department:

I believe the way I was treated was unjustified and wholly disproportionate. I assert that officer xxxxx misused her powers of arrest and demonstrated a poor understanding of the law in relation to arrest, the use of force, the use of detention, photography in public places, obstruction and the Prevention of Terrorism Act 2000. Furthermore I assert that officer xxxxx is unsuitable to act as a police officer or at the very least requires further training if she is intimidated by a male of an unremarkable stature taking a single picture with a camera pointed in her direction. I assert that officer xxxxx failed to follow the correct procedures when conducting his search of me and perpetuated the use of unreasonable force by refusing to release me from handcuffs. I assert that PCSO xxxxx demonstrated an unacceptable attitude by making a veiled threat towards me in relation to my future activities as an amateur photographer. I seek for these matters to be fully investigated, the process and outcomes of which I request to be shared with me. With regards to redress I seek a written apology in relation to any shortfalls identified with regards to the involved officer's conduct and consideration of compensation to be made to me for the upset, embarrassment and psychological trauma caused. I would also like Kent and Medway Police to liaise with Medway Council in order to identify the two unidentified men that initially stopped and questioned me. I seek for their conduct to also be fully investigated, the process and outcomes of which I request to be shared with me.

Section 44 in Chatham High Street. (Thanks, Mike!)

The Walking Dude writes "The International Commission on Nuclear Non-proliferation and Disarmament (ICNND) has released an unclassified report exploring the possibility of cyber terrorists launching nuclear weapons. Ominous exploits include unreliable early warning sensors, unsecure nuclear weapons storage, transportation blunders, breaches in the chain of command, and the use of Windows on nuclear submarines. A traditional large-scale terrorist attack, such as the 2008 Mumbai attacks, could be combined with computer network operations in an attempt to start a nuclear war. Amidst the confusion of the traditional attack, communications could be disrupted, false declarations of war could be issued on both sides, and early warning sensors could be spoofed. Adding to this is the short time frame in which a retaliatory nuclear response must be decided upon, in some cases as little as 15 minutes. The amount of firepower that could be unleashed in these 15 minutes would be equivalent to approximately 100,000 Hiroshima bombs."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Amazing! Thomas Thwaites' created this handmade toaster from 100% natural materials he mined from the earth himself - even smelting the iron ore via microwave. The project's description from the Royal College of Art's Design Interactions Show -

For nine months I've been trying to make an electric toaster, myself, starting from scratch. Travelling to disused mines around Britain, digging up raw materials, processing and forming them into a hand crafted pastiche of a product sold in Argos for the throwaway price of £3.94.

My quest is perhaps absurd, but the contrast in scale between the products we use and the industry that produces them also seems absurd. Massive industrial activity in the pursuit of additional modicums of comfort at lower prices - small trifles, like an evenly crispy piece of toast, that we quickly become accustomed too. However, I like toast, as well as many of the other trappings of 21st Century life. The laboriousness of producing even the most basic material from the ground up exposes the fallacy in a return to some romantic ideal of a pre-industrialised time. But at a moment in time when the effects of industry are no longer trivial in relation to the wider environment, the throwaway toasters of today seem unreasonable. The provenance and the fate of the things we buy is too important to ignore.

Wow - left to my own devices, I'm guessing I'd take my chances with a campfire and a couple of sticks. More pics of the manufacturing process and the common appliances used therein can be seen on the project's page. Thanks to commenter tiedyedpie for pointing out the finished piece!


More:

Smelting iron ore in a microwave

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I love all of the... er... juice that electric-powered drag racing has been getting lately. I just found out today, via the HacDC e-list, that there's electric drag racing right near me, the Power of DC, coming up the end of August, in Hagerstown, MD. It's the 9th annual race, hosted by the Electric Vehicle Association of DC.

And yes, the race will be held on SUNDAY, SUNDAY, SUNDAY!

Pictured above is Juiced Up, Shawn Lawless' 240 volt electric rail from Youngstown, OH.

Power of DC

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Last November, the EFF took Apple to task for threatening the owner of a wiki site. Apple claimed that an ongoing discussion on the site about how to build interoperability between iPods and iPhones and alternative software other than iTunes violated the DMCA -- which requires quite a novel interpretation of the DMCA. After Apple refused to back down, EFF sued in April. Somewhere along the way, it looks like Apple's lawyers started to realize that it had pretty close to no chance whatsoever and has now withdrawn this particular threat. The EFF is dropping the lawsuit, but isn't pleased that the whole thing had to happen in the first place:

"While we are glad that Apple retracted its baseless legal threats, we are disappointed that it only came after 7 months of censorship and a lawsuit," said EFF Senior Staff Attorney Fred von Lohmann. "Because Apple continues to use technical measures to lock iPod Touch and iPhone owners into -- and Palm Pre owners out of -- using Apple's iTunes software, I wouldn't be surprised if there are more discussions among frustrated customers about reverse engineering Apple products. We hope Apple has learned its lesson here and will give those online discussions a wide berth in the future."

Indeed. While the Palm Pre situation is in the other direction (interop between alternative hardware and iTunes software, rather than alternative software with Apple hardware), it shows again that Apple will do whatever possible to stop people from making legal use of products they purchased.

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As part of the ongoing serialization of Makers, my forthcoming book (late October 2009, from Tor USA and HarperCollins UK), Tor.com has commissioned a series of 81 interlocking, Creative Commons-licensed illustrations from Idiots' Books. Each illustration's four edges line up with any of the other illustrations' edges.

Now Tor has released a Flash game that lets you arrange the tiles to form new illustrations, with new tiles being added three times a week, as each new installment comes online. Tile away!

Tile Game (Flash)

Behold: The Makers Tile Game, version 1.0!

These old-school NES controller business card cases will ship in October; GeekStuff4You is taking pre-orders at ¥2,900.00 (about 42.2 Bosnia and Herzegovina Convertible Marka, 85 Samoan Tala or 0.912g of gold).

NES Controller Type Card Case (via Akihabara News)

Ben from Amnesty sez,

Amnesty recently released a report (PDF) focusing on Shell's human rights violations in the Niger Delta In response, a few hundred of our activists used Twitter to send a message to @shelldotcom, asking them to schedule a 'Shell Dialogues' (their online chats around particular issues) about Nigeria. They responded fairly quickly, and scheduled the chat for 2pm UK (9AM Eastern, 6AM Pacific) today (Thursday).

We are asking people to simultaneously join in with Shell's heavily moderated 'chat' on shelldialogues.com and our chat. We're gathering people's questions to hold Shell to account on the issues highlighted.

Challenge Shell in a live web chat (Thanks, Ben!)

alphadogg writes "Two days after a report cast doubt on Zer01 Mobile's business, its parent company has stripped its Web site down to only basic information. New details have also come to light suggesting a past connection between two of the involved companies, despite claims to the contrary. Earlier this week IDG News Service reported that it's unlikely that Zer01 could be technically able to offer the unlimited mobile voice and data service that it is advertising. The service, originally targeted for a July 1 launch, does not appear to be available yet. In addition, it's being marketed through a multilevel marketing program run by a company called Global Verge whose founder, Mark Petschel, in 2005 pleaded guilty to securities fraud. Petschel is currently on probation."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

roelbj writes "Automotive stories are few and far between on Slashdot, but today's news from Chevrolet might just make a few readers' mouths water at the chance to own their own Bumblebee. Today at Comic-Con, General Motors officially announced the 2010 Chevy Camaro Transformers Special Edition. The $995 appearance package can be applied to LT (V6) and SS-trim Camaros in Rally Yellow with or without the optional RS package."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Joe Mullin has been covering the story of how patent attorneys have been jumping into abusing the patent system with a fervor over the past few years -- either getting patents themselves on trivial concepts or buying up patents and aggressively suing over them. The classic case of this involved Scott Harris, who not only got a bunch of patents himself, but those patents were then used in lawsuits against clients of his own law firm, Fish & Richardson. Think about that for a second. Harris lost his job, but it appears that as long as you do the same thing while not still working for F&R, perhaps it's ok. Mullin has the story of a former F&R lawyer, who bought up a bunch of patents and has been suing a ton of big name companies. In some of the cases, he's been using Fish as his lawyers. In others, he's been suing Fish clients (though, not using Fish as his lawyers in those cases). Basically, this all just becomes a huge tax on innovation. A bunch of lawyers get extra wealthy while companies that are actually innovating are forced to fork over millions of dollars to the lawyers who think they're playing a game. I recently had a dinner with a young patent attorney who said the system is sickening from the inside (he's looking to get out of the patent business). You see these top patent lawyers who are making millions by abusing the system, and they absolutely love the fact that they're abusing the system. It makes them rich that they find the whole thing to be a joke. They don't care that it's harming companies and American innovation, just so long as they can buy expensive cars and houses.

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Al Nassma, a Dubai-based camel's milk chocolate company is planning to export its wares overseas to the US and UK. No word on whether any of the enslaved South Asian workers who make the stuff have fallen in the vats.

With 3,000 camels on its Dubai farm, the company sells chocolates through its farm-attached store as well as in luxury hotels and private airlines. It plans to launch an online shopping facility within a month, Van Almsick said. The farm is controlled by the Dubai government...

"We aim to be the Godiva [ed: Ew. Aim higher, camel chocolate man!] of the Middle East," Van Almsick said in an interview. "It's a luxury product, so we will never be in supermarkets. The plan is to be in one mall in each UAE city."

World's first camel-milk chocolates going global (via Consumerist)

(Photo: Camel, a Creative Commons Attribution photo from Victoria Reay's Flickr stream)

The Uvula chair is hand-woven from strips of alumnium -- sounds like a fun project for the kids on the weekend, providing you've got some decent hand- and eye-protection around:

Scream is a new aluminum chair from Bannavis Andrew Sribyatta of PIE Studio, an eco-friendly furniture design firm. Made with the same method as their prize-winning Steel Tongue chair, the piece is constructed by hand-weaving an aluminum skin over a stainless steel frame. According to PIE, " The inspiration derives from a screaming mouth exposing the Uvula. The Uvula moves down and touches the floor as one sits on the chair."

This Just Inbox: Scream, a hand woven aluminum chair (via IDSA Materials and Processes Section)

Creative Commons artist and filmmaker Nina "Sita Sings the Blues" Paley sez, "Artist Nina Paley (that's me) and writer Stephen Hersh are freeing 'The Hots,' a daily+Sunday comic strip they produced for King Features Syndicate in 2002-2003. They are making all the strips free under a Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike license. But the project needs volunteers to upload the strips one at a time to Wikimedia Commons, where they can be read, shared, and enjoyed by everyone. They also need descriptions and dates; any other relevant information is welcome."

The Hots return - and need your help (Thanks, Nina!)

At 5AM today -- about an hour ago -- just as my alarm went off, someone in the street below started shouting CALL POLICE! CALL POLICE! I grabbed my phone and went to the window, and saw a man in the street, shouting and looking up at the third-story roof of the office building across the street. Looked over just in time to see a man shinning down the side of the building, holding onto a cable -- probably the co-ax cable. The cable snapped, and the man -- a cat-burglar, apparently -- fell the rest of the way. My wife started calling police while I grabbed my camera. The police-shouter ran over to the fallen burglar and tried to block him, while the burglar screamed, "My leg is broken," and commenced crawling across the street, alternating cries of "My leg is broken" with "I didn't do nothin'." Halfway across, a dog-walker came by, spoke with the police-shouter, the burglar, and went back. When the burglar reached the opposite kerb, he took out his phone and called someone and started shouting "Please come get me, my ankle is broken, just come!"

Meantime, a third man -- I think he worked in the office building -- came out and called the police. The burglar continued to insist on his innocence, shouting every time he moved and jarred his leg. Six or seven minutes later, six police cars arrived, and I went back inside.

A strange way to start the day. Hope his leg is OK.

Cat burglar falls three storeys across the street at 5AM

SpuriousLogic writes "A detailed, functional artificial human brain can be built within the next 10 years, a leading scientist has claimed. Henry Markram, director of the Blue Brain Project, has already built elements of a rat brain. He told the TED global conference in Oxford that a synthetic human brain would be of particular use finding treatments for mental illnesses. Around two billion people are thought to suffer some kind of brain impairment, he said. 'It is not impossible to build a human brain and we can do it in 10 years,' he said."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Image above: Natalya Estemirova, courtesy Human Rights Watch. The following guest essay was written by Jasmina Tešanovi?. Full text of essay continues after the jump, along with links to previous works by her shared on Boing Boing. See also this related New York Times piece, written by a journalist who knew Ms. Estemirova.

---

On 15 July Natalya Estemirova, 50, was kidnapped and murdered by unknown assailants in the Chechen capital Grozny. The mother-of-one worked for the human rights organisation Memorial and was a close friend of the journalist Anna Politkovskaya, also murdered in 2006.

A human rights activist is killed like a dog, executed, dumped and humiliated in front of the eyes of a million people, who know that what she was saying was true, right, honest and proper.

Because, you see, WE ALL DO KNOW THAT. Good and bad guys know Natalya was telling the truth, in Russia, in Chechnya, in US in Europe. And yet we all stay silent about her death. Most of us turn the head the other way, as if it is none of our business, as if it is inevitable, as if it were somebody else's world.

Presidents sometimes say: a serious inquiry should be done in this case. Violence on journalists is not permitted. How could they say otherwise? Today when words count almost nothing compared to the escalating violence, to the human annihilation.

Where are the movie stars, those celebrities who adopt poor children, sing songs in the deserts, catwalk all the politically correct arenas? Why don't the superstars for once raise their voice and protect ONE peaceful human rights activist -- who in her or his life has done more than the whole constellation of stars shining from their heaven on the global poor?

Where is the solidarity, the everyday culture of us normal human beings, who know that the freedom to behave humanely, with all those habeus corpus human rights, is challenged every day in the streets, in the workplaces -- not only in wars, battlefields, mass graves? Why don't people of any city flock out to the squares as they did for the death of Michael Jackson, or some other mass media idol? Have we grown so stupid and blind to allow assassinations to be part of our daily life? Is this our present-day normality, and if so, what of our future?

When I hear Natalya speaking, I have no cultural, racial or language misunderstandings to bridge. I know exactly what she is saying, and to whom she is appealing. She is telling us just like Anna Politkovskaya and many other humanist activists, to live in truth, band together and defend the common denominator of basic human rights. You don't need to be Russian or speak Russian to understand that we are all in the same boat.

The abuse of civilians by an armed shadow state within the state is happening everywhere. Democratic regimes have abandoned state control over their military machines; the modern gunmen are privatized, offshored, clandestine and deniable. The best voices, the best actions come not from politicians but from relentless activists, journalists, lawyers. These are the Hypatias of 21 first century: the voices of reason and science. They are not gurus, they are not visionaries, they are not leaders, they are not stars. They bear witness with their lives and write what they know first hand. We must be clear and forthright about what it means to all of us, when assassins burn their books and bodies, as witches, as testimonies of uncomfortable truths.

---

Jasmina Tešanovi? is an author, filmmaker, and wandering thinker who shares her thoughts with BoingBoing from time to time. Email: politicalidiot at yahoo dot com. Her blog is here.

Previous essays by Jasmina Tešanovi? on BoingBoing:

- Less Than Human
- Earthquake in Italy
- 10 years after NATO bombings of Serbia
- Made in Catalunya / Lou and Laurie
- Dragan Dabic Defeats Radovan Karadzic
- Who was Dragan David Dabic?
- My neighbor Radovan Karadzic
- The Day After / Kosovo
- State of Emergency
- Kosovo
- Christmas in Serbia
- Neonazism in Serbia
- Korea - South, not North.
- "I heard they are making a movie on her life."
- Serbia and the Flames
- Return to Srebenica
- Sagmeister in Belgrade
- What About the Russians?
- Milan Martic sentenced in Hague
- Mothers of Mass Graves
- Hope for Serbia
- Stelarc in Ritopek
- Sarajevo Mon Amour
- MBOs
- Killing Journalists
- Where Did Our History Go?
- Serbia Not Guilty of Genocide
- Carnival of Ruritania
- "Good Morning, Fascist Serbia!"
- Faking Bombings
- Dispatch from Amsterdam
- Where are your Americans now?
- Anna Politkovskaya Silenced
- Slaughter in the Monastery
- Mermaid's Trail
- A Burial in Srebenica
- Report from a concert by a Serbian war criminal
- To Hague, to Hague
- Preachers and Fascists, Out of My Panties
- Floods and Bombs
- Scorpions Trial, April 13
- The Muslim Women
- Belgrade: New Normality
- Serbia: An Underworld Journey
- Scorpions Trial, Day Three: March 15, 2006
- Scorpions Trial, Day Two: March 14, 2006
- Scorpions Trial, Day One: March 13, 2006
- The Long Goodbye
- Milosevic Arrives in Belgrade
- Slobodan Milosevic Died
- Milosevic Funeral

Pictures from the longest solar eclipse of the century. Boston Globe -

Earlier today, the moon passed directly in front of the sun, causing a total solar eclipse that crossed nearly half the Earth - through Nepal, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Myanmar and China. Today's was the longest total solar eclipse of the 21st century, lasting as much as 6 minutes and 39 seconds in a few areas. Despite cloudy skies in many of the populated areas in the path, millions of people gathered outside to gaze up and view this rare event. Collected here are a few images of the eclipse, and those people who came out to watch.

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Various entertainment industry lobbying groups have pushed for courts to force ISPs to block access to sites like The Pirate Bay, but now it looks like BREIN, the Dutch anti-piracy group, is trying to hit this from a variety of angles. If it can't get ISPs to block access to The Pirate Bay, it's demanding that The Pirate Bay block access from Dutch surfers. Even more bizarre, it's already dragged representatives from the proposed buyers of the The Pirate Bay, GGF, into court, despite the fact that the deal hasn't concluded (and may never actually happen). When do judges recognize that these organizations don't have any logical basis for what they claim, but that they'll simply throw everything at the wall to see what sticks in a mad dash to protect an obsolete business model from innovation?

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There's a roundup of YouTube vids over at urlesque, but none so funny as this cover of Sade's "Smooth Operator." (Thanks, Stephen Lenz)

Mike writes "Carnegie Mellon roboticist Dr. William Whittaker has teamed up with Astrobiotic Technology to develop a solar powered moon rover that will explore the Apollo landing site in 2011. The photovoltaic clad robot features two electric motors in the hub of each wheel, and a half cone of solar generators up top that will power the wheels, run computers, and beam stereo HD video back to earth. The project has been entered in the $25 million Google Lunar X Prize competition."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In the spirit of our "Teach Your Family to Solder" week, the flashback I'm offering up this week is from the pages of our sister publication, CRAFT. Brookelynn Morris' LED Hula Hoop project from CRAFT Volume 06 is a super fun project to practice your mad soldering skillz. It's fully suitable for peeps who have never soldered before and still fun for peeps who are pros. The best part is that you end up with a flashy toy that'll make you the life of the block party. Here is a picture of Brookelynn's friend Dawn in the throes of soldering up an LED Hula Hoop of her own:

In the project, Brookelynn even has a sidebar titled "Soldering Is So Easy":

Solder virgins, never fear! Imagine a soldering iron as a conductive-metal glue gun. A glue gun uses heat to melt glue that is sticky and liquid, and cools quickly. The soldering iron is similar: it's a heat element that melts the metal solder into small drops of hot liquid metal. Just press the tip of the iron against the wires to be soldered to heat them up for 2-3 seconds, then touch the solder right onto the connection and watch it melt, forming a liquid metal connection. Just as with a glue gun, after the melted material has been laid on, it quickly cools and hardens. Be sure to remove the iron and the solder while the drop is still hot, so they don't stick to the connection. Apply the solder like a glue gun, but then brush it like paint: make a smoothing, rubbing motion with the tip.

Don't be afraid to try this technique for the first time. The tools are available for $10, and as with anything new, practice makes perfect. Feel free to burn through a foot of solder making practice drops onto practice joined wires. It's very satisfying to watch the metal melt and to see the perfect soldered connection.

For a great video soldering tutorial, visit makezine.com.

Here is the full article in our Digital Edition so you can get started. Be sure to post pics to the MAKE Flickr pool when you're done soldering some spark for your swivel.

The Maker Shed also offers the ProdMod LED Hula Hoop Kit, which conveniently compiles all of the materials you need for this project for you. You bring the tools and the skills.

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Over the last few months we've been hearing all these claims about how various "aggregators" and internet sites that simply rewrite articles from "mainstream" publications are somehow "parasites." But, of course, that ignores the fact that many of those mainstream publications do the exact same thing themselves. So, for example, earlier this week, there was a cute AP article getting passed around about a girl by the name of Kelly Hildebrandt who was bored one night and looked on Facebook for anyone else with her name, and found that the only other one was actually a guy. One thing led to another, and now they're getting married to each other (awwwww.) Anyway, not long after that, I saw that the BBC appears to have a very similar article, and it's quite clear that all they did was rewrite the AP's article. At one point, they do credit the AP, but the article is almost a direct paraphrase of the AP's. So does the AP start calling the BBC a parasite, too? Or does it finally realize that no one owns the news, and lots of publications often rewrite the news and have for ages?

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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. 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.

1. You just got change, and you have a Canadian penny. What do you do?
a. Demand a real penny, damn it, not one of these cheap knock-offs

b. Check with those nearby to see if you really are in Canada, and if so, find out why

c. Swallow it, quick, before they find you

d. Unwrap it and eat the chocolate

2. You find an eclair in your sock drawer. You:

a. Put on a pair of socks

b. Put on the eclair

c. Look for the other eclair, cause there must be a pair

d. Pinch yourself cuz you must be dreaming

3. What can I say to God to get into heaven?

a. Do you have any idea who I am?

b. I just need to get in for a minute I want to see if my friends are there.

c. I can make your life very difficult

d. Come on god, be cool, man, be cool



4. If you were a tree, where would you go out to eat?

a. Miracle-Gro Casino Sunday Morning Champagne Brunch Buffet

b. Taco Bell because trees always seem to be broke

c. Tree food court at the tree mall

d. Red Lobster

e. Anything off the trunk of a $1000-a-night tree hooker



5. You catch your lover in bed with C-3P0. You:

a. Congratulate the better man.

b. Ask for a C-3some-0.

c. Get really C-3P.O.'ed.

d. Ask him to autograph the VCR.

e. May as well watch, because it's hard to picture how this goes down


(Thanks, Van Gogh-Goghs)

Michael_Curator writes "Developers are finally getting their hands on the developer preview of Google's Wave, which means we can finally get some first-hand accounts of what it's really like to use, unfiltered by Google's own programmers. Ben Rometsch, a developer with U.K. Web development firm Solid State, blogged that, it's 'probably the most advanced application in a browser that I've seen.' Wave is like giant Web page onto which users can drag and drop any kind of object, including instant messaging and IRC [Internet Relay Client] clients, e-mail, and wikis, as well as gadgets like maps and video. All conversations, work product and applications are stored on remote servers — presumably forever. 'It's like real time email. On crack,' he wrote. And unlike the typically minimalist Google UI, 'It feels a lot more like a desktop application that just so happens to live in your browser.'" User molex333 has already written a Slashdot app and shares his initial reactions here.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Over on our sister site Craftzine.com, Wendy Tremayne and Mikey Sklar of Holy Scrap Hot Springs show you how to make dog biscuits that are inexpensive, nutritious, enjoyable to your dog, edible for you (why not share?), can be cooked in a solar oven, and are quick and easy to make from natural, simple ingredients.

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A disruptive mobile phone company claims to have launched on July 1. It's called Zer01, and if on the level, would radically incite price competition in the US cellular market. Zer01 is an MVNO or MVNE (depending on when you spoke with them), and they say that they can offer cheap unlimited service by the 3G GSM cellular data network of a national partner, which they will resell. Voice services would be delivered as data using VoIP. Zer01 launched with unlimited voice, text, and data plans for $79.95 a month - including tethering your laptops all you want, and with no contract. The problem is: there is no evidence that this service actually exists. Nancy Gohring at ComputerWorld digs in to the story, and found a lot of reasons to be suspicious about the company. Added all together, it looks pretty shady, and reminds us of the Gizmondo scandal back in 2005.

But a few people in the comments of Gohring's article said Gohring pulled a hatchet job on a legit young company. They argue that many young companies start out looking rough around the edges. "Where was Microsoft's headquarters when they launched?" Perhaps some young companies do look this sketchy at the onset, but not the hundreds of startups that I've seen and evaluated in my career! And certainly not any company that has a serious shot at taking on the national Tier-1 cellular carriers, head-on. If you want to battle with Verizon Wireless, nationwide, for data, voice, and support services, your business needs to look a far sight more established than a startup with a mailbox in a Vegas strip mall. If you claim patented technologies, devices, a customized On Device Portal, then you should have a team of engineers on staff somewhere, and the USPTO should be aware of your patent. SK Telecom and Earthlink launched an MVNO, Helio, which failed at taking on the big carriers despite the track record of being the #1 carrier in South Korea, and a decent kick off investment of $440M, then $200M more, then $270M more. But OK, let's suspend disbelief just a bit longer: Maybe a small, scrappy company is just shrewd enough to win where others have failed. I want to believe, too. But after interviewing Zer01, I just can't buy into the dream.

I interviewed Zer01 CEO, Ben Piilani at CTIA this year (April Fool's Day). I was lured by their PR release about their plan, which sounded incredible. But after our half-hour interview, my parting words were "Good luck to you, but sign me up as skeptical." During our chat, Piilani said lots of things that struck me, as an experienced telecom analyst, as... um... wrong. Here are just three parts of the interview:

1. Piilani told how, in delivering wireless data to phones, the wireless part of the connection is the easiest part to handle, and since ZER01 uses its own fiber backhaul network, but only uses the Wireless Carrier for that easy wireless jump, host carriers don't mind the impact because there is ample capacity. I thought, "Wha? That doesn't fit with all the research coming out saying that wireless capacity is being pinched. Nor does it jibe that the carriers just spent $Billions at the spectrum auctions for access to more cellular channels." But then Piilani went on, "You know that in Europe, data is basically free. You can show up in the airport and buy a SIM card, slap it in your phone, and the data is unlimited." Um... I thought, "I was in Europe last month for MWC, and at least once a year for the past 10 years. And as a wireless data analyst, I've bought about 20 of the SIM cards he's talking about. I'm pretty sure I would know if there were an unlimited data, SIM-only option."
   
   As anyone in telecom knows, there is not. I thought to myself: "How odd that he would say such an absolute falsehood. And odder still that he does not know enough about the cellular industry to understand how obviously false he sounds."



2. I wanted, most of all, to see the proof in the pudding. I wanted to make a call over the company's VoIP over 3G solution. I asked Ben if I could make such a test call, and he said sure, and hooked me up with a Product Manager at the end of our interview. I asked if we could place a call, but the PM began instead by showing me the phone's fancy looking On Device Portal (ODP) UI running on WinMo. He was explaining the great UI and all the apps that were to be included. So I said, "Click on one or two of those nice-looking icons and show me the apps." I picked the icons, and behind every one was an "under construction" response. He picked a couple, and there were some deeper pages. But the ODP was basically window dressing with nothing inside.



3. So I pushed, and said, "Mr. Piilani sent me over here to make a phone call on your device. Let's call my phone." He replied, "Oh, sorry. Our PR firm told us not to make any calls on the show floor, because the wireless signal here is so unreliable with so many people using it." Odd that Mr. Piilani wasn't aware! I said, "Sure, but the carriers have all put COWS onsite, and no one is having signal problems this year. Look there's one guy talking on his phone right there, and my phone is four bars." He said, "Well, PR told me not to." I thought, "Fail."

I left with serious doubts about Zer01's ability to deliver on their promises, and some suspicion that they might not be on the level. Piilani and his team must have impressed someone, though, because they ended up wining a Best In Show award from Laptop Magazine, and getting praise from some analysts, even while at least a few others were more suspicious. Gohring's much more thorough recent investigation pretty much blows the top off of this story, though. Gohring suggests that Zer01 bears some resemblance to a pyramid scheme, where the real money comes from an ever growing network of distributors or "e-affiliates" who pay money for the right to resell the service. In fact, Zer01 is sold through a network of "e-affiliates" using a Multi-Level Marketing (MLM) setup managed by two other companies, Buzzirk and Global Verge. The Buzzirk cost of entry and compensation schemes incent distributors to join in at $150 the first month, and then $100 monthly thereafter. There are lower join levels, but they don't offer the MLM revenue benefits. For their money, distributors gain the right to a lookalike e-affiliate website that appears... ahem...bush league, and the right to sell the phones... which haven't actually appeared yet. Zer01 itself claims a network of 50,000 distributors. Assuming that is so, MLM revenues could be over $7M in just the first month -- but that's got nothing to do with actual service revenues.

For an example, check out "Robin and Jerry's" e-affiliate website, replete with photos of the phones they haven't touched yet. The pictures are of standard Windows Mobile devices, and it's interesting to note that the UI shown is either MSFT generic, or the product of (totally legit) German software company Spb Software House. Funny that they're using Spb's images to sell Zer01 instead of actual Zer01/Buzziker screens. Since the phones aren't available, the only thing the MLM websites really sell is a position as a distributor, lower down the food chain.

The MLM world is infamous for its own jargon. Buzzirk is no exception with a "3x9 matrix with vertical and horizontal compression." Most of the distributors defending the scheme at scam.com were saying they would find vindication when the "Triple Diamonds" got the phones. Triple Diamonds are those e-affiliates who have recruited at least 25 active e-affiliates under them, and they are the elites who are expected to get the phones first, and can finally validate whether there is any reality to the story or not. So far, the Triple-Diamonds are only getting delays from Buzzirk and Zer01.

So, is this whole thing legit? Will there be phones? Is it a pyramid scheme, or just MLM?

In the US, a pyramid scheme is illegal, and is defined by an utter lack of product, and a focus on the recruitment of additional distributors instead of product sales. But since Zer01 is a separate legal entity from the MLM distribution companies, they can't be accused of a pyramid scheme -- they simply sell their phones to 'entirely separate companies'... with similar office locations. Meanwhile, Buzzirk and Global Verge, despite recruiting their e-affiliates with a focus on the mobile phone offering, also are clear that they offer other products that their e-affiliates can sell, such as a "water saver," a "power saver," and "identity theft protection." Thus, it is possible that the phones will never arrive, Zer01 will say "Sorry, just couldn't pull it off," and blame it on Ma Bell. Buzzirk and Global Verge can say, "Sorry, e-affiliates, no phones. Thanks for the fees, but stick around to sell the water saver," thus, engaging in legal MLM, not a pyramid. This paragraph is certainly just speculation, but cautious investors might want to investigate further whether the mobile phone service is just an oasis to lure them into an expensive "water saver" MLM franchise.

I've seen all forms of wacky claims made by Zer01 re-sellers while researching this post. I've read how it roams from AT&T, to T-Mobile, to Rogers, to TELUS (with no mention of the fact that TELUS uses CDMA networks not supported by the phones they offer). I've read that it will work in airplanes, that "it's got the 2100MHz speed," that you can download a movie to your laptop in 3 minutes, that it includes SMS MasterCard mobile payment, and that it uses "the proprietary patented technology that Zer01 has that allows your phone to switch from GSM, Tri-Band, Quad-Band, Wi-Fi to connect to the VoIP," that it's 4G, that it's 5G and that it offers 20Gbps on a private FTC-licensed 2100MHz network. The claims range from the improbable to the technologically incoherent or both. The company leaders suggest that this is caused by confusion, and overzealous distributors. Perhaps some clear, correct, and well-presented franchiser information would abrogate the need for the creation of falsities? When so many of the e-affiliates are lying, I think the company at the center still deserves at least some of the blame. Besides, much of the gibberish is right off the Buzzirk franchised website, like "Internet speeds will range across GPRS, EGPRS, EDGE, and even 3G when available." Someone should have told these telecom experts that EGPRS and EDGE are exactly the same thing.

There will surely be Zer01/Buzzirk/Global Verge defenders popping up in the comments, some from the companies, others that just disagree, and some from the 50k "distributors" who have already been convinced to re-sell Zer01. There is a whole army of people out there who, once fooled, have pride, cognitive dissonance, and personal financial interest in defending Zer01. Comment away, call me a hack, and exercise polite free speech. But please also make your case: offer your telecom credentials if you have any, tell us where the Zer01 engineers are, what the special technology is, where the towers are erected for that proprietary 2100MHz network, who the network provider is, how standard HTC phones can push 20 Gbps of data with just a SIM card upgrade, where the claimed patents are, with whom Zer01 has Mobile Network Operator contracts, and if you have used one of the Zer01 devices personally and can vouch that they exist, and work (and aren't just AT&T SIM phones with an ODP).

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

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