One of my big complaints with all the stories from newspaper people about how they're suddenly going to put up paywalls and charge, was that they never actually talked about adding more value. They seemed to just assume people would pay, when the truth is that they've never really paid for the content. But, of course, if you can really connect with people, and give them a reason to buy, then that's something different. But "the news" alone is not a reason to buy, because it's not scarce. It's quite abundant, and if someone charges, then people will just go elsewhere. But there are plenty of scarcities that you can charge for if you're smart about it -- and it looks like the NY Times may actually be taking a more intelligent approach to its own business model.

Last week, as you hopefully know, we kicked off our latest business model experiment, by launching our CwF + RtB options, based on the formula that we've seen many musicians use successfully: Connect with Fans (CwF) + Reason to Buy (RtB) = Business Model. So it's fascinating to see some of what the NY Times is exploring for its own premium offers. While these are still apparently works in progress, some market research shows that the NYT is considering two separate added value tiers. These aren't about locking up the content, but providing additional (scarce!) value that people may find worth paying for.

For example, in the proposed silver level ($50/year) people would get early access to some stories (a la our Techdirt Crystal Ball), as well as some additional features on the site, a choice of a tote bag, baseball cap or some other products, and early access for tickets to NYT's events. Not bad. The proposed gold level ($150/year) also gives the person access to exclusive events, direct access to some of the reporters/writers/staff at the NY Times (even a newsroom tour) and some other features. This is still preliminary, but it seems like the NY Times is definitely thinking in the right direction. It's not about locking up the content that's already there. It's about providing a real reason to buy something additional that's scarce and valuable. And, certainly, given the NY Times' reputation, it has connected with many, many people. So, now let's see what happens when it gives them real reasons to buy. Who knows what model will eventually be launched or how successful it really is, but it's interesting to see the NY Times apparently stealing our idea (that's a joke, people). In all honesty, it's great to finally see a newspaper looking at adding value, not trying to take it away.

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Hugh Pickens writes "The Washington Post reports that Department of Homeland Security is relying on a rushed, flawed study to justify its decision to locate the $700 million National Bio and Agro-Defense Facility for highly infectious pathogens in a tornado-prone section of Kansas. A GAO report says that it is not 'scientifically defensible' to conclude that lab can safely handle dangerous animal diseases in Kansas. Such research has been conducted up to now on a remote island on the northern tip of Long Island, NY. 'Drawing conclusions about relocating research with highly infectious exotic animal pathogens from questionable methodology could result in regrettable consequences,' the GAO warned in its draft report. Critics of moving the operation to the mainland argue that a release could lead to widespread contamination that could kill livestock, devastate a farm economy, and endanger humans. Along with the highly contagious foot-and-mouth disease, NBAF researchers plan to study African swine fever, Japanese encephalitis, Rift Valley fever, and other viruses in the Biosafety Level (BSL) 3 and BSL-4 livestock laboratory capable of developing countermeasures for foreign animal diseases. According to the article, DHS lobbied a Congressional committee to try and convince them that the GAO report was flawed, and to head off any hearings on the controversy. Despite this, the House Energy and Commerce Committee's oversight and investigations subcommittee plans to hold a hearing Thursday on the risk analysis."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Glenn Fleishman lets us know that Verizon is finally offering nationwide Wi-Fi access to its high-speed Internet customers, long after Cablevision's similar service went live. While Cablevision is building out an in-house network of hotspots, Verizon is relying on a deal with Boingo Wireless — a strategy with both strengths and drawbacks, as Wi-Fi Net News points out. Neither Verizon's nor Boingo's announcement reveals the mechanics of how existing Verizon DSL and FiOS customers will get access, but an AP report spells it out: "To use a hotspot, the customer must install software that works only on computers with Windows Vista or XP installed. Phones, iPods, and Macintosh computers with Wi-Fi can't access the hotspots."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Glenn Fleishman lets us know that Verizon is finally offering nationwide Wi-Fi access to its high-speed Internet customers, long after Cablevision's similar service went live. While Cablevision is building out an in-house network of hotspots, Verizon is relying on a deal with Boingo Wireless — a strategy with both strengths and drawbacks, as Wi-Fi Net News points out. Neither Verizon's nor Boingo's announcement reveals the mechanics of how existing Verizon DSL and FiOS customers will get access, but an AP report spells it out: "To use a hotspot, the customer must install software that works only on computers with Windows Vista or XP installed. Phones, iPods, and Macintosh computers with Wi-Fi can't access the hotspots."

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.

One of my dogs, Virginia, went blind late last year. I knew it was coming; she has glaucoma, and lost sight in one of her eyes a while before. We'd been keeping the other eye alive with lots and lots of medicine, but the vet told us it was just a matter of time. So, when the morning came and I found her running around crazily all over the house, nose to the ground, I shouldn't have been surprised.

Still, I was pretty alarmed. And while I read lots on the internet about this, and even saw the articles that said not to panic, the dog will adapt, those articles were almost invariably written by the sort of hyper-caring earth-mother women who could say taking care of a limbless, eyeless, incontinent sea lion was an easy, rewarding experience anyone could do. I didn't really buy it.

So, when she went blind, I did end up going a bit nuts. She's a profoundly sweet-natured and smart dog, and seeing her struggle, without benefit of understanding why, was wrenching. I looked into research into artificial vision, surgeries, other medications; everything was either a pipe dream, insanely expensive, and almost nothing guaranteed any vision retention. It was crazy, and while I was being an idiot, Virginia was out there, rewiring her little brain to make it work.

It's really amazing. In far less time than you'd ever guess, she adapted-- far, far better than I ever realized would be possible. I made the usual mistake of anthropomorphizing the animal I live with. Her brain just works differently than ours do: I'm told when they go blind, dogs just think something along the lines of "It's nighttime always now. Huh. How about that." and they get on with it. Plus, they're much less avid readers than us, and, of course, their primary sense is smell, so they're in a much better position to give up sight than, say, me.

Virginia learned how to navigate the yard and the house. She checks for open doors with her snout, she uses her ears far more than before it seems-- you can 'remote control' her through unfamiliar territory by clapping or yelling, and she'll make a straight vector to the recognized sound source. Plus, she got rid of her phobia of men who fit some mold from her past, because, apparently, the nose gives everyone a fair shake.



I knew she's really adapted when I saw her chasing squirrels. And doing a surprisingly good job of it. I made a little diagram here showing a bit of how I think she does it: the nose gives a general radar-like image of squirrel locations; the ears, each pivoting independently, are triangulating rapid movement and locations with some advanced unconscious dog-math; she has a good map of the yard in her brain, and I think she gets more information from her paws about the surface she's on, which must help pinpoint where she is in her mind's map.

Granted, she still occasionally plops on a pillow already occupied by another dog or cat, and will bump into things. When she does, though, she's completely undaunted, and bolts off headlong without fear. I close my eyes and try to take a few timorous steps, and I'm flailing my arms around in front of me like one of those inflatable monsters that try to get me to buy a used car.

None of this is really shocking information, I'm sure. But hopefully, another voice, one not really particularly skilled with animals, telling anyone going through something like this not to panic, and have some trust in your pet, will help put things in perspective.

Good girl, Virginia.

Joe Mullin has another excellent article looking at an important ongoing patent lawsuit, Prometheus Laboratories v. Mayo Collaborative Services, which looks at whether or not certain medical tests can be patented. As Mullin notes, it's a situation where patent system believers find themselves diametrically opposed to doctors, who feel patents on such things are a serious problem and harming patient health. Once again, what you see is a single entity trying to block out competition in an effort to gain monopoly rents, even if people are harmed in the process by not being able to get or afford important medical tests. And the biggest concern (especially among medical professionals) is the idea that you can patent counting something that occurs in nature:

"The patents are based on observations of the laws of nature," says David Herbert, chief administrative officer for Mayo Medical Laboratories. "We chose to make a stand." Such "observational" patents increase costs, slow innovation, and worsen patient care, he says. "It doesn't allow the test to be performed close to the bedside, and there's no ability to have second opinions."

The lawsuit is in the appeals court right now -- with a current ruling that the patents aren't valid for merely observing nature, though an earlier summary judgment found the other way. Still, this isn't just some random discussion on patents and copying. Lives are at stake, and doctors are pissed off at the ridiculousness of the situation:

"Physicians have longstanding obligations to advance and share useful medical knowledge with patients and physicians." Patents on basic scientific principles "threaten to stifle innovation and raise the costs of medical treatment." And claiming exclusive rights to "scientific facts," such as the correlation that Prometheus purports to own, actually harms research and personalized medicine rather than helping it, the doctors argue.

Hopefully the court realizes how dangerous such patents are for society (beyond just being ridiculous) and rejects them.

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Behold, Carmencita Calderón, rocking the tango at her 100 year birthday party. And here are more videos of famous tango dancers, dancing when they were older. Both via Manolo the shoeblogger.

Hugh Pickens writes "The Guardian reports that according to a study commissioned by the International Commission on Nuclear Non-proliferation and Disarmament (ICNND), a joint initiative of the Australian and Japanese Governments, terrorists could use information warfare techniques to make a nuclear attack more likely — triggering a catastrophic chain of events that may be an easier alternative 'than building or acquiring a nuclear weapon or dirty bomb themselves.' While the possibility of a radical group gaining access to actual launch systems is remote, the study suggests that terrorists could focus on feeding in false information further down the chain — or spreading fake information to officials in a carefully orchestrated strike. According to the study 'Hacking Nuclear Command and Control' [PDF], cyber-terrorists could 'provoke a nuclear launch by spoofing early warning and identification systems or by degrading communications networks.' Since command and control systems are placed at a higher degree of exploitation due to the need for rapid decisions under high pressure with limited intelligence, cyber-terrorists 'would not need deception that could stand up over time; they would only need to be believable in the first 15 minutes or so.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Police say firefighter Charles Diez was upset that a man was riding a bike with his 3-year-old son on a busy street so shot the cyclist in the head. The bullet embedded itself in the rider's helmet.

Diez was arrested on attempted first degree murder charges, but lucky for him the fire department in Asheville, NC is keeping him on paid investigative leave, so he will continue to draw a salary.

Asheville Firefighter Shot Bicyclist -- Officers Say Pair Argued Over Child Safety

Benjamin points us to yet another (and another and another) example of copyright law gone insane. It involves Kyle Gann, a music professor, composer, author, etc. who was working on his latest book, but had to drop an entire section because he wasn't allowed to quote short sentences that are, themselves, apparently considered works of art, without getting permission from the original authors:

I've been trying to get permission simply to refer to Fluxus pieces like La Monte Young's "This piece is little whirlpools in the middle of the ocean," and Yoko Ono's "Listen to the sound of the earth turning." And of course, Yoko (whom I used to know) isn't responding, and La Monte is imposing so many requirements and restrictions that I would have to add a new chapter to the book, and so in frustration well past the eleventh hour, I've excised the pieces from the text.

Yes, it's become so impossible to quote a single short sentence, that it's just not worth doing at all. Welcome to permission society. Some copyright system believers may claim that this is just the market at work, but it certainly seems a lot more like an undue restriction on freedom of expression at the hands of copyright law. I can't see, frankly, how using copyright law to ban such writing isn't a clear violation of the First Amendment. He even wasted a bunch of time thinking about ways around this:

Some of these pieces are too brief to refer to without quoting them in their entirety. How do you use Nam June Paik's "Creep into the vagina of a living female whale" as an example without giving the whole piece away? How am I supposed to refer to it: "Creep into the vagina, etc"? Call it Danger Music No. 5 and tell you to look it up? Paraphrase it: "crawl into the birth canal of a matronly member of the order Cetacea"? And if the copyrights are held by unreasonable people who can hold your book hostage to their detailed demands, then it's just time to find a different research area. The situation is absurd, somebody under whatever questionable chemical influences scrawls seven words on a piece of paper and 50 years later I can't refer to that piece of paper without paying someone some money and following their prescriptions.

Now, I would think that Gann would have a pretty clear claim to fair use if he were to use the phrases he wanted, but it appears his publisher doesn't even want to bother with the potential battle -- and since fair use is (as copyright maximalists gleefully love to remind everyone) merely a "defense" rather than a "right" (which isn't entirely accurate either), the only way to guarantee that this is fair use is to (a) get sued and (b) have a court rule on it -- something that no one should have to contemplate, just while writing a book on art. What a shame and a loss. Yet, it's what this world has become thanks to out of control copyright law and this sense of "permission culture," where even free expression now requires a request for permission and an open checkbook.

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Western Digital has announced a couple of new 2.5-inch mobile hard drives weighing in at 750GB and 1TB. The drives feature a 3 GB/s transfer rate and Western Digital's "WhisperDrive" tech along with specialized shock tolerance and head parking to ensure durability. "Both models are shipping now through various channels; the 1TB model is currently available in My Passport Essential SE USB drives. The Scorpio Blue 750GB model has a suggested sticker price of $190 while the Scorpio Blue 1TB is a mere $250. The My Passport Essential SE 1 TB portable drive is $299.99 USD and the 750 GB model is $199.99 USD."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

So. Incredibly. Cool.

What is DNA Origami?
DNA origami is a powerful method for constructing DNA objects. It involves taking a long, single-stranded DNA backbone (usually about 7000 bases in length) and forcing it to adopt an arbitrary shape using hundreds of short, single-stranded DNA oligonucleotides (each usually 20 to 50 bases long). This method was developed by Caltech scientist Paul Rothemund and published in the 16 March 2006 Nature cover story Folding DNA to create nanoscale shapes and patterns.

In a process that is not yet well-understood, DNA origami structures are typically assembled through a process of heat denaturation followed by gradual cooling. More details about the method can be found in various publications.

caDNAno is made for designing DNA origami.
caDNAno is open-source software based on the Adobe AIR platform for design of three-dimensional DNA origami nanostructures. It was written with the goal of providing a fast and intuitive means to create and modify DNA origami designs. You can learn how to use it, download a copy of the program and some example designs, or even modify the source code.

The software makes heavy use of several fantastic open-source libraries and resources, especially Papervision3D for 3D rendering, Michael Baczynski's AS3 data structures and tutorials, the Tango Desktop Project for icons, and the Blueprint CSS framework for this website.

caDNAno [via @timoreilly]

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zeazzz writes to mention that the folks over at UMPC have a very cool little writeup and pictorial of a user's latest wearable PC. With the surge in smart phone adoption it seems that enthusiasm for wearable computers has dropped off a bit, which is too bad. I certainly look forward to my augmented reality HUD instead of depending on my iPhone for everything. "Essentially he took the MyVu headset, removed one of the eye pieces, and mounted the other to his glasses to that he could see his surroundings and the UX's screen at the same time. The MyVu is attached to the UX through the A/V output port on the UX's port replicator dongle. With some additional addons he provided his UX with extra battery life via an external battery, and several input methods to communicate with the UX while the rest of the kit resides within the backpack."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Josh Sulkin, of FlyOnTime.us, has created this interesting little Twitter crowdsourcing experiment:

I'd like to announce some major changes to the Apps For America 2 entry FlyOnTime.us, as well as ask for your help in a "crowdsourcing" experiment I'm conducting.

First the experiment...I originally wanted to incorporate the data from the TSA's airport security line wait time calculator into my website, but unfortunately they discontinued it for some reason:

http://www.tsa.gov/travelers/waittime.shtm

It seems they are revamping it, but regardless it didn't provide the information I really want which is real-time data on the wait time at the airport security lines.

My proposal is for you to go to flyontime.us from your iPhone, Blackberry, or other smart phone when you enter a security line and tell me what airport you're at (a form for this will automatically come up if you're viewing the website on a mobile phone). Likewise,
when you exit the security line, just click a button on the site to tell me so, and this way I'll know how long you were in line. If enough people do this, I can get real time statistics on airport security wait times.

I also wrote some code to monitor Twitter, so if you want you can just tweet this message when you enter airport security:

#airportsecurity xxx in

and tweet this message when you leave the line:

#airportsecurity xxx out

where xxx is an airport code like "ord" or "lax". This way you don't have to go to my website but I can still monitor the real-time wait times. More information on this is available at:

http://www.flyontime.us/lines/security

I have no idea if this idea will work or be a total flop, but this is Sunlight LABS after all, so it seems like a good place to try this kind of experiment. So, if you're traveling some time soon, consider contributing your wait time. Also, if you like this idea, please spread the word (one way is to mention @flyontime and "TSA crowdsourcing" on twitter).

FlyOnTime.us [Thank you, Alberto!]

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duanes1967 writes "A company called Joule Biotech claims to have a breakthrough in biofuel production. Their process can create 20,000 gallons of fuel per acre per year at a cost of about $50 per barrel. 'Algae-based biofuels come closest to Joule's technology, with potential yields of 2,000 to 6,000 gallons per acre; yet even so, the new process would represent an order of magnitude improvement. What's more, for the best current algae fuels technologies to be competitive with fossil fuels, crude oil would have to cost over $800 a barrel says Philip Pienkos, a researcher at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, CO. Joule claims that its process will be competitive with crude oil at $50 a barrel. In recent weeks, oil has sold for $60 to $70 a barrel.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

One of my favorite authors, Nicholson Baker, reviewed the Kindle 2 in the latest issue of The New Yorker.

Within, lying face up in a white-lined casket, was the device itself. It was pale, about the size of a hardcover novel, but much thinner, and it had a smallish screen and a QWERTY keyboard at the bottom made of tiny round pleasure-dot keys that resisted pressing. I gazed at the keys for a moment and thought of a restaurant accordion.

The plug, which was combined with the USB connector, was extremely well designed, in the best post-Apple style. It was a very, very good plug. I turned the Kindle on and pressed the Home key. Home gives you the list of what you’ve got in your Kindle. There were some books that I’d already ordered waiting for me—that was nice—and there was also a letter of greeting from Jeff Bezos. “Kindle is an entirely new type of device, and we’re excited to have you as an early customer!” Bezos wrote. I read the letter and some of “His Majesty’s Dragon” (a dragon fantasy by Naomi Novick set during the Napoleonic Wars, given away free), “Gulliver’s Travels,” and “Slow Hands,” a freebie Harlequin Blaze novel by Leslie Kelly. I changed the type size. I searched for a text string. I tussled with a sense of anticlimax.

The problem was not that the screen was in black-and-white; if it had really been black-and-white, that would have been fine. The problem was that the screen was gray. And it wasn’t just gray; it was a greenish, sickly gray. A postmortem gray. The resizable typeface, Monotype Caecilia, appeared as a darker gray. Dark gray on paler greenish gray was the palette of the Amazon Kindle.

This was what they were calling e-paper? This four-by-five window onto an overcast afternoon? Where was paper white, or paper cream? Forget RGB or CMYK. Where were sharp black letters laid out like lacquered chopsticks on a clean tablecloth?

Like Baker, I prefer reading Kindle books on my iPhone. He said switching from reading on an iPhone to reading on a Kindle was "like going from a Mini Cooper to a white 1982 Impala with blown shocks."

Can the Kindle really improve on the book?

Last week we announced our fun CwF + RtB experiment, offering up lots of cool options for people to purchase, if they found them worth it. We've had a tremendous response so far, and we've definitely got some more exciting things coming up, but we'll start today with two announcements concerning the offerings:

First, we're thrilled that we can now offer up international sales on all hard goods items as well (previously, it was limited only to domestic sales for the hardgoods). There were a few issues that needed to be worked out to do that, but we've now figured out most of the legal details that made it such a pain and can now accept orders and ship to most places around the globe. We've received plenty of requests from outside the US asking us when this would happen -- and the answer is now: so check it out.

Second, we're offering up a special promotion for this week only:

If you order both the Techdirt Music Club and the Techdirt Book Club between now and midnight PT, August 3rd (one week from today), we'll throw in either a free Techdirt Hoodie, or, if you happen to be local to the Bay Area -- a lunch with me (obviously, you're responsible for getting yourself to the lunch). If you've already bought one of the two packages, to qualify, you just need to buy the other (for yourself, or a friend!) and you'll qualify as well.

The book club and the music club are really quite wonderful offerings. The music club has some great stuff not available anywhere else -- including a unique, one-of-a-kind notebook that Jill Sobule will personalize for you (by hand) by writing out some lyrics and some doodles on the first few pages, along with a copy of her latest CD. You'll get the Who Killed Amanda Palmer book signed by both Amanda and Neil Gaiman and the Who Killed Amanda Palmer CD. You get the very cool (you have to see it to believe it) Moto Boy music box, and a signed copy of the For Martha CD, and then a special customized -- for the Techdirt crowd only -- signed CD from Joe Pug, that includes both tracks from his Nation of Heat CD, as well as special previously unreleased tracks.

The book club includes what I consider to be the four "must read" books this year, concerning the issues we talk about here on a regular basis. If you want to sound intelligent about these things, those are the four books to read -- and in this case, each one will be signed by the author, which makes it a really special collection. On top of that, we're including my Approaching Infinity book (signed by me). So, if you buy them both -- this week only -- you end up getting six books all signed by their authors, four CDs also signed by the musicians, a fantastic one-of-a-kind notebook by Jill Sobule, a beautiful wind up music box from Moto Boy and your choice of a Techdirt hoodie or a lunch with me (if you happen to be near where I am).

Once again -- the addition of the free hoodie or lunch with me only lasts until midnight PT, August 3rd, though, of course, you can continue to buy the packages until we run out. Thanks so much for everyone who's already participated. We've been overwhelmed by the response, which far exceeded our expectations, and we're working on many more ideas for the future as well!

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An anonymous reader writes "I have been asked to contribute to my university's revised ICT (Information and Communication Technology) strategy and I am curious what fellow Slashdot members consider to be the main advice in this context. What are the major mistakes that organizations like universities make? Given the complexity of the different participants in a university, how does one have a coherent strategy that fulfills the needs of such a wide audience? How does one promote open source in a managerial culture? How does one deal with the curse of the virtual learning environment?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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.

Here's an interesting clip from a National Geographic documentary that compares the way humans and chimpanzees learn. When asked to perform a series of motions in order to get a treat out of a box, the human child will copy the adult's motions exactly. The ape copies the motions as well, until the box is replaced with a translucent version. Once it is, the ape realizes that half of the motions are pointless and takes a shortcut to get the treat; children, on the other hand, continue to do the meaningless motions that they were taught.

According to the filmmakers, this illustrates how both humans and chimps learn through copying, but children are "better" at it. That very well may be. But shouldn't the chimps should be given props for problem-solving here?

Experiments like this always drive me a bit crazy because the social setup isn't exactly parallel. Children are being asked to copy other humans, whereas the apes are expected to follow a different species. Would children be as good at copying (or obeying) if chimps were the ones giving instructions?

Of course, even if chimps were asked to imitate older chimps, they probably wouldn't copy as precisely as the children, and that's ultimately the filmmakers' point. The children are able to see rote repetition as the point of a game whereas the chimp might only be able to grasp "getting the treat."

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.

Should you ever care to delve into America's history with eugenics, the Image Archive on the American Eugenics Movement is a handy thing indeed. It's hard to believe eugenics was as popular here as it in fact was without seeing the visual evidence. The images here include Fitter Family contests, where white Americans competed at state fairs--much like cattle--to determine who had the best breeding. (Make sure to check out this traveling exhibit.) Also, lots of documents and flyers linking criminality to immigrants and heredity. (Oh, the irony of using the swastika to indicate the racial inferiority of Germans!) The interface is pretty clunky but it's worth pecking around.

For background on the early 20th century American eugenics movement, you could do worse than my interview with historian Daniel Kevles.

Here's an interesting take on the multitool, it's called a Harp Tool ($40), because it resembles something of a harp when it's closed. Tools include slotted- and Phillips-head screwdrivers, punch/awl, saw, corkscrew, file and small/large-head hammer (which doubles as a bottle opener). Stored in a leather carrying case.

byrd 8Tool Harp [Thanks, Daniel Carnes!]

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I enjoyed this three-minute trailer for Jim Shepard's short story "Your Fate Hurtles Down at You," which appears in the Electric Literature: #1 paperback anthology.

A fun time is in store for adult intellectuals who visit Meltdown Comics in Los Angeles on Wednesday, July 29.

Comic book historian Craig Yoe will be signing copies of his book, Secret Identity: The Fetish Art of Superman's Co-Creator Joe Shuster. And the world-famous Suicide Girls have kindly offered to join in the festivities by donning fetish outfits and acting out scenes from the book.

Secret Identity party at Meltdown Comics in LA, Wednesday, July 29 (Google Calendar link)

Dr_Ken writes to mention recent coverage of a Harvard Cyber-Law study on Techdirt that analyzes the uses of copyright in the academic world. Some are claiming that the applications of copyright in academia are stifling and that we should perhaps go so far as to abolish copyright in the academic world entirely. "I've even heard of academics who had to redo pretty much the identical experiment because they couldn't even cite their own earlier results for fear of a copyright claim. It leads to wacky situations where academics either ignore the fact that the journals they published in hold the copyright on their work, or they're forced to jump through hoops to retain certain rights. That's bad for everyone."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

There are banks that have worked out ways to charge you both for using and for not using your account enough, but hearing about Midwest utility Xcel Energy trying to justify its reasoning for charging homes with solar panels for not using their services is just mindbogglingly ridiculous:

"We just don't think it's fair that customers that don't have solar panels on their homes should subsidize these solar panel customers any further."

No, that doesn't make any sense. After all, isn't the whole point of those with solar panels being that they don't need much (if any) energy from the utility? I know in many places, the local utility will actually buy excess solar energy from home owners. But, here we are again with "entitlement society" at work. The idea, via Xcel, is that it's somehow owed its fees -- and if people are willing to go with an alternative, then they need to keep paying up anyway.

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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.

This NPR story basically confirms what I've always suspected: crows are very smart, and I never should have said those terrible things to that crow a few years back.

I really like crows, and occasionally I'll get a, well, murder of them in my backyard, where they all sit around and caw and cackle to each other, making a huge cacophony that sounds like some large family gatherings I've tried unsuccessfully to avoid. Maybe it's some sort of crow senate. Regardless, they're smart, and they know what you look like.

JWZ sez, "The event we have at DNA Lounge this Wednesday seems relevant to your interests: OpenDNS and Meraki are hosting a free party in honor of System Administrator Appreciation Day at DNA Lounge, Wed Jul 29 from 6pm to 10pm."

This is pretty much my favorite holiday of the year -- the day when we celebrate the unsung heroes of the wiring closet and the server room and the admin interface. All hail the sysadmins, especially Our Ken, who is a freaking god.

A sysadmin unpacked the server for this website from its box, installed an operating system, patched it for security, made sure the power and air conditioning was working in the server room, monitored it for stability, set up the software, and kept backups in case anything went wrong. All to serve this webpage.

A sysadmin installed the routers, laid the cables, configured the networks, set up the firewalls, and watched and guided the traffic for each hop of the network that runs over copper, fiber optic glass, and even the air itself to bring the Internet to your computer. All to make sure the webpage found its way from the server to your computer.

A sysadmin makes sure your network connection is safe, secure, open, and working. A sysadmin makes sure your computer is working in a healthy way on a healthy network. A sysadmin takes backups to guard against disaster both human and otherwise, holds the gates against security threats and crackers, and keeps the printers going no matter how many copies of the tax code someone from Accounting prints out.

A sysadmin worries about spam, viruses, spyware, but also power outages, fires and floods.

When the email server goes down at 2 AM on a Sunday, your sysadmin is paged, wakes up, and goes to work.

A sysadmin is a professional, who plans, worries, hacks, fixes, pushes, advocates, protects and creates good computer networks, to get you your data, to help you do work -- to bring the potential of computing ever closer to reality.

So if you can read this, thank your sysadmin -- and know he or she is only one of dozens or possibly hundreds whose work brings you the email from your aunt on the West Coast, the instant message from your son at college, the free phone call from the friend in Australia, and this [blog].

Party like a SysAdmin in San Francisco July 29th (Thanks, JWZ!)

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.

Anyone remember the 1980s TV series V? I was a kid when they were on, and only barely remember it, but I do recall some reasonably creepy face-peeling by the reptilian aliens as they tore off their human masks to reveal their true, scaly selves.

Honestly, that's about all I remember. But just based on that, I wouldn't have guessed it as a good candidate for a kid's lunchbox set. But then I saw this Thermos on display at a diner in the California desert, and I realized how much growing up I have to do.

Two-hour panel discussion between 11 type community representatives regarding the licensing of fonts for the web. #

The above 1893 newspaper drawing forecasts what humans may look like in the "year million." It accompanied an article on our possible evolutionary direction that appeared in The World on December 3, 1893. "The Man of the Year Million" was a notion that HG Wells also explored. (Loren Coleman reposted the 1893 article over at Cryptomundo because the drawing bears an uncanny resemblance to a 1977 sketch of a cryptid called the Dover Demon.) From the 1893 article in The World:

In some of the most highly developed crustaceans, the whole alimentary canal has solidified into a useless cord, because the animal is nourished by the food in which it swims. The man of the year million will not be bothered with servants handing him things on plates which he will chew, and swallow and digest. He will bathe in amber liquid which will be pure food, no waste matter assimilated through the pores of the skin. The mouth will shrink to a rosebud thing; the teeth will disappear; the nose will disappear-it is not nearly as big now as it was in savage days-the ears will go away. They are already folded up from what they were, and only a little tip fast vanishing remains to show that ages ago they were long-pointed things which bent forward and backward to catch the sound of approaching enemies.

"1893 'Dover Demon' and the Man of the Year Million" (via Robert Schneck)

KingofGnG writes "Disney has chosen the San Diego Comic-Con International to present its new sci-fi project: the sequel to Tron. The classic movie from 1982 dealt with video games, virtual reality and 3D graphics when none of those things were widely popular. The new movie has got an official title and synopsis now, and they've released the very first trailer from the movie (this time without silly censorship) together with some concept art and the teaser poster." No matter how silly the movie is, they'll at least get my money for sheer nostalgia.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Brian Dereu sent me a sample of the hollow spy coins that he makes and sells. It came with a metal collar that makes it easy to open. I don't think I'll ever find a use for it, but I like having it anyway!

Hollow Spy Coins

I thought a light bulb had burned out in the lighting fixture in the ceiling. The light bulb was fine -- dead bees in the glass cup were blocking out the light. (This photo shows only about 1/3 of the bees -- the rest fell on the floor when I took out the glass cup.)

For years, we've been hearing stories from various people insisting that WiFi makes them ill. The only problem? There is absolutely no evidence to support this at all. Double blind tests with people have shown that the people who claim that WiFi makes them ill are no better at figuring out whether or not there's WiFi in a room. A more recent, and rather thorough, test showed that while those who claim "electromagnetic sensitivity" are having cognitive and neurobiological reactions, it's got absolutely nothing to do with electromagnetic waves. That is, the presence (or absence) of electromagnetic generating objects made no difference on the person.

And yet... reporters just seem to love the story about people being allergic to WiFi. The latest is in the Daily Mail over in the UK, which has an entire article all about a guy who lives in "agony" because of all the WiFi around. Not once does the reporter look into the evidence of the "allergy" but does claim that 2% of the population suffer from this. The guy travels around with a WiFi detector to protect him... but it's not protecting him from whatever is causing his problems (as the study found). You would think that a reporter would actually check the facts on such things, right?

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Al writes "Microsoft researchers have come up with a novel way to fine-tune the algorithms behind the company's new search engine, Bing: a game that harnesses human computing power to improve the results. Called Page Hunt, the game (which of course requires Silverlight to run) shows users a webpage and asks them to figure out a search query that should produce the page within the first 5 results. The idea is to better understand user behavior and expectations and ultimately improve its search algorithms. Other human-computing projects have sought to digitize out-of-print text (reCAPTCHA) and image labeling (Google Image Labeler). Can Microsoft use a similar approach to gain the edge over its rival? Or does Google already have the edge with SearchWiki, which lets searchers re-rank its results."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Antonio Fernandez Martinez, driving a Ford Crown Victoria with flashing lights, attempted to pull over a car in Oakland last week. The problem is, Martinez isn't a police officer. But the man he tried to pull over is. From the Associated Press:

Martinez, a convicted car thief, will have his felony probation revoked and could face a prison term.

The officer, Jim Beere, says Martinez probably thought he'd be an easy mark to rob.

"Police: Fake officer tries to stop real officer"

Dr. Daniel Fletcher and colleagues at the UC Berkeley Bioengineering Graduate group have built a simple, low-cost system that uses a cell phone camera to perform medically useful micro-imaging. They have, for example, been clearly able to identify malaria-infected blood cells as well as sickle cells using the device. Perhaps just as exciting is that Fletcher, et. al., have published their research in PLoS One, which is a freely-available online scientific journal. You can download and/or read their entire paper here.

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The Spratlys island chain consists of hundreds of tiny islands in the South Pacific. The LA Times calls it "the most disputed island chain on Earth."

The Philippines government, in an attempt to bolster its claim to ownership of the Spratlys, has been sending civil employees to live on Pagasa, a 75-acre Spratlys island since 2002. But the forced settlers hate living on the tiny rock, which can be walked around in 30 minutes.

In a nation where half the 90 million residents endure grinding poverty, Pagasa volunteers get free food and housing and guaranteed work. But there's also guaranteed boredom. Many who inhabit Pagasa consider the calendar their worst enemy. Others mark off time on the wall like stir-crazy convicts.

With a main port named Loneliness Bay, the island can take such a psychological toll that one inhabitant stabbed himself just to escape it. Another hanged himself two days after he arrived.

"The happiest day on Pagasa is when the boat comes to take you off," said Robles, who after three months on the island last year has returned home here, only to dread his next Pagasa assignment. "Next is seeing the plane arrive with supplies. The sound of those engines means cigarettes and alcohol."

Squatters in paradise say it's job from hell

theodp writes "Ever wonder why you and the boss don't see eye-to-eye on the importance of meetings? Paul Graham explains that there are Maker Schedules (coder) and Manager Schedules (PHB), and the two are very different. With each day neatly cut into one hour intervals, the Manager Schedule is for bosses and is tailor-made for schmoozing. Unfortunately, it spells disaster for people who make things, like programmers and writers, who generally prefer to use time in units of half a day at least. You can't write or program well in units of an hour, says Graham, since that's barely enough time to get started. So if you fall into the Maker camp, adds Graham, you better hope your boss is smart enough to recognize that you need long chunks of time to work in. How's that working out in your world?" Ironically enough, I have a meeting to attend in 3 minutes.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Barry Diller has apparently declared that "free content is a myth." Good thing you can read about it -- for free -- online. A little suggestion: it helps not to declare something a myth when it's already a fact and already widespread. But, just to see how it works, I'm calling Barry Diller a myth. That's about as accurate as calling free content a myth -- but if he can get away with it, I should be able to also, right?

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Recently deployed as part of the Atmospheric Neutral Density Experiment test program, the Pollux satellite carries student-designed payloads built with Arduino -

Westfield High School accelerometer payload: This payload uses the Atmega16 microcontroller and measures the voltage of three SCA610 accelerometers made by VTI Technologies. The accelerometers will be used to detect rotation in three axis. Software was developed using the Arduino software which makes programming in C/C++ easy.

Marshall Academy gyroscope payload: This payload also uses the Atmega16 microcontroller and Arduino software. The payload collects the rotation rate and temperature from each of the three Melexis MLX90609 gyroscopes. The 75 degree/sec version was selected to support measuring rotation rates up to 12.5 rpm.

Federation of Galaxy Explorers Gyroscope payload: This payload also uses the Atmega16 microcontroller and Arduino software. The gyroscopes are Analog Devices ADXRS401 75 degree/sec devices. Also included in the payload is the PNI Corp. MicroMag3 3-axis magnetometer.

(I'm guessing they meant to say "ATMega168", instead "ATMega16" ?) Read more on the project on the Stensat Group's site. [via Arduino Blog]

In the Maker Shed:

Arduino Duemilanove

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My post last week about shadowgraphy and Schlieren photography generated a lot of enthusiastic responses and not a few requests for a more detailed tutorial. Among the comments was one by Ian Smith, who has a great page here describing his own Schlieren photography set-up. (While you're there, take a moment to appreciate the fact that Ian's URL is "www.ian.org"....think he's been around the 'net awhile?) Thanks again, Ian!

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Kirk Demarais created a series of colored pencil portraits depicting some favorite families from Hollywood films. The latest pieces are on display until August 8 at Gallery1988 Los Angeles' Crazy 4 Cult: 3-D group art show. "Kirk Demarais's paintings of movie families" (via Dangerous Minds)

During the early 20th century, Storyville was New Orleans' red light district. The 1947 film New Orleans is about the final days of the district and the fictionalized "birth of Jazz" out of its brothel scene. (No, it wasn't the white owner of a gambling joint who brought jazz to the masses.) The film features Billie Holiday and Louis Armstrong in key roles and other jazz greats like Kid Ory, Budd Scott, and Meade "Lux" Lewis. Over at the "Clean Living In Difficult Circumstances" site, Stephen Grasso has clips of the film and some of the story behind Storyville. Image seen here by EJ Bellocq who photographed Storyville prostitutes.
"New Orleans, Storyville and Billie Holiday"

path0$ writes "British Ex-DJ Steve Miller claims that his WI-FI-allergy is making his life one big misery , forcing him to live in an iron-clad home far from any neighbors. According to the article more and more people are suffering from an allergy like his. The only positive side to this is that at least Miller didn't think of suing anybody yet, like these people who claim to suffer from the same condition did and were mentioned in a slashdot article in 2008."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

We've debuted a number of these wonderful N.A.S.A. videos (not to be confused with NASA) on Boing Boing Video, and this latest release on YouTube is no less spectacular, starring Sri Lankan street diva M.I.A..

N.A.S.A. "Whachadoin?" feat. M.I.A., Spank Rock, Santogold, & Nick Zinner. (Squeak E. Clean Productions, Dir: Jimena Oddi & Jorge Jaramillo; Producers: Susan Applegate & Tito Melega. DP: Santiago Mellazini) N.A.S.A.'s debut album: "The Spirit of Apollo."

eldavojohn writes "MIT Researchers have unveiled a new potential replacement for barcodes. Using an LED covered with a tiny mask and a lens, these new bokodes can be processed by a standard mobile phone camera and can encode thousands of times more information than your average barcode. New applications are being dreamed up by the team. Dr. Mohan of MIT said, 'Let's say you're standing in a library with 20 shelves in front of you and thousands of books. You could take a picture and you'd immediately know where the book you're looking for is.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"No Justice, No Juice" is the rallying cry of those joining the fight to support the popular webcomic "Get Your War On," after an aparrent ripoff in an ad campaign for the American juice franchise Jamba Juice.

BB guestblogger Carrie McLaren blogged about the controversy here last week. More about the uh, creative similarities on GYWO artist David Rees' website here.

Jamba Juice has issued a response, but it's pathetic:

Jamba Juice would like to expressly communicate that the Summer Bliss promotion was not intended to imply any affiliation with Mr. Rees, Mr. Rees' endorsement of Jamba Juice and its products, or Jamba Juice's endorsement of Mr. Rees' work."

Jambattorneys, if you're reading, here's why that's pathetic: what's at issue isn't that people think Rees "endorses Jamba Juice and its products" (he says he "prefers wine") but that to my non-lawyer eyes, Jamba Juice appears to have ripped of Rees' well-established body of work.

I don't know if what Jamba did is illegal or not, I just know it seems unfair and uncool.

Snip from Rees' step-by-step analysis of the Jamba campaign (a sample ad is inset, below):

# The clip art is public domain, of course, anyone can do anything with it ... but check out the word balloons! JAMBA JUICE TOTALLY BIT MY GYWO WORD BALLOON STYLE! Rounded-edge text box with single line pointing to mouth? I developed that in 2001 using Quark XPress 4!!! THAT'S MY SHIT!!! Jamba Juice, you're a bunch of BALLOON-BITERS.

# First person to sue Jamba Juice on my behalf CAN KEEP ALL THE MONEY. All I care about is destroying Jamba Juice and their overpriced dumb-ass juices. EAT A PIECE OF FRUIT, you morons, you're missing most of the fiber.

Look, IANAL, but it doesn't take a lawyer to smell something fishy in the wheatgrass. There's even a Get Your War On book, for cryin' out loud. Lazy ad agencies, if you're gonna copy someone's work without credit, at least pick on lesser-known, web-only artists whose work hasn't been online for 8 years. They're easier targets.

I'd like to see Jamba Juice apologize and buy David Rees a box of chardonnay, then call it a day.(thanks, Sean Bonner)

Update: Cory weighs in on the controversy.

Below, Xeni posts about Jamba Juice's outrageous plagiarism of David Rees's brilliant Get Your War On webcomic. Like many of Rees's fans, I'm also pissed off by this, but not because of "theft" or "infringement" -- as Rees himself points out, he uses a bunch of public domain clipart to make his work; if the roles were reversed (funny webguy uses the same public domain art as big company to do something that subverts the original), we'd all be crying fair use, and rightly so.

No, what pisses me off about this is that it's plagiarism. The unsigned Jamba Juice ads look like they're Rees's work. Even a sophisticated person who's familiar with both Rees and Jamba might mistake one for the other.

This may or may not be illegal -- you could argue that Rees has a common-law trademark claim against Jamba -- but it is certainly unethical. It's sleazy. It fools the public into thinking that Jamba Juice has an endorsement that it just doesn't have.

It's easy to get caught up in property talk here and declare that Rees owns clip art, or clip art with funny speech bubbles, or what-have-you, but Rees isn't doing that and we shouldn't either. We don't need to invent exotic new copyright laws that confer ownership over clipart to condemn Jamba Juice: we can make recourse to the tried-and-true principle of not tricking people into buying your products and not plagiarizing other people.

Jamba Juice accused of stealing "Get Your War On" artist's work; GYWO calls for boycott

James "Top Gear" May is asking for volunteers to help construct a two-story lego house in Surrey, England. The project is part of his BBC program, Toy Stories. From Get Surrey:

On Friday, more than three million Lego bricks were delivered to the vineyard in preparation for the task.

Denbies marketing and business development manager, Jeanette Simpson, said: “The millions of bricks came all the way from the Czech Republic. The house will be life-size with a staircase, toilet and shower.”

"Lego house attempt for James May's Toy Stories" (via Neatorama)

Dig this vintage clip of the late Carl Sagan explaining the 4th dimension with a trip through "Flatland." And it is a trip. Of course, the weird realm of Flatland was first proposed by Edwin Abbott in his 1884 novella Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions. (via The Daily Grail)

(Ed. Note: We recently gave the Boing Boing Video website a makeover that includes a new, guest-curated microblog: the "BBVBOX." Here, folks whose taste in web video we admire tweet the latest clips they find. I'll be posting periodic roundups here on the motherBoing.)

---

More @BBVBOX: boingboingvideo.com

Rachel @ CRAFT writes:

Craftster user redflag created this awesome Simpsons mosaic tabletop from leftover tiles and plates from the Target clearance aisle and a thrifted table. She freehanded the images, making it a most impressive piece!

What interests me most about this mosaic is the scene: a seemingly mischievous plot by C. Montgomery Burns to promote reverse-stereotypical underage drinking among Lisa and Milhouse, while a disapproving ghost of Moe Szyslak looks on.

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Panasonic has announced the Lumix DMC-FX65 (FX60 in Europe) digital compact camera. It incorporates a 5x optical zoom lens (25-125mm), 2.7 inch LCD and a 12.1MP sensor. It features the latest Venus Engine V processor, Power OIS image stabilizer and HD output.

Panasonic has released the Lumix DMC-FP8 digital compact. Sporting a new card style body design, it incorporates a 28-128mm equivalent lens with folding optics. It features the industry's fastest autofocus and a start-up time of 0.95 seconds. The 12.1MP camera with a 2.7 inch LCD also features the new Power OIS image stabilizer and offers HD video recording.

Panasonic has released the Lumix DMC-FZ35 (DMC-FZ38 in Europe) super-zoom digital compact camera with AVCHD lite HD video recording. Successor to the DMC-FZ28, it features an 18x optical zoom lens (27- 486mm equiv.), the new Power OIS image stabilizer and a faster Venus Engine HD processor. The 12.1 MP camera also features a Quick AF system that claims to be two times faster than that of the DMC-FZ28.

Panasonic has launched the Lumix DMC-ZR1 (ZX1 in Europe) incorporating the world’s first 0.3mm aspherical and spherical lens elements. The super-zoom compact with an 8x optical zoom lens starting at a wide 25mm equivalent, features a 12.1MP sensor and and 2.7 inch LCD. It includes Panasonic's latest Power OIS image stabilizer that the company says offers twice the shake suppression capability of the previous Mega OIS stabilizer.

Like tiny pixel synths made real, Beem Music shares pics of these super cute Lego synthstruments inspired by the previous paper versions. More to enjoy in the Flickr photoset.

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FelxH writes "Scientists have found that evolution is driving women to become ever more beautiful, while men remain as aesthetically unappealing as their caveman ancestors. The researchers have found beautiful women have more children than their plainer counterparts and that a higher proportion of those children are female. Those daughters, once adult, also tend to be attractive and so repeat the pattern." I just thought my standards were changing as I got older, but it turns out it's just science!

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Well, this one was rather easy to predict. Way back in November, after coming under pressure from various grandstanding state Attorneys General (who seem wholly unfamiliar with Section 230 of the DMCA), Craigslist caved in to pressure (despite no legal basis requiring them to do so), and it changed the way its exotic services section worked. The various AGs claimed they were satisfied. But it took all of a few months before some misguided news report showed that people were misusing Craigslist again, and suddenly these AGs sensed an opportunity to get press... so they went on the offensive again, blaming Craigslist for the actions of its users. It makes for a good headline.

Once again, in May, Craigslist caved again and further changed how the site worked and handled "adult" type ads. It also showed that the ads on its site were a lot less graphic than those found on many sites run by traditional newspapers. But, suing the local newspaper doesn't generate headlines like suing Craigslist. And, given that it did such a good job generating press (and got Craigslist to cave when it didn't need to), you had to assume that it wouldn't take long for politicians to start complaining again.

And... here we go. Connecticut's AG Richard Blumenthal, who has milked the bogus Craigslist story for a while, along with Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart, who sued Craigslist earlier this year, have both come out to once again grandstand against Craigslist and insist that the company still isn't doing enough.

Seriously. Can someone send either of these gentlemen a copy of Section 230 of the CDA, along with a nice side dish of common sense. To wit:

• It is not Craigslist that is the problem. It is the users of the site who are advertising prostitution. They are the ones violating the law. Not Craigslist.
• Not only that, but Craigslist is very cooperative with law enforcement officials in helping them track down those who break the law via the site. Plenty of law enforcement officials have figured this out and know to use Craigslist as a tool to help them crack down on prostitution.
• Cracking down on Craigslist doesn't slow down or prevent the illegal activity at all. Those who are involved in prostitution (i.e., the actual law breaking) are still out there, and are quick to find other sources in which to advertise.
• So cracking down on Craigslist is blaming the messenger -- and making it more difficult to really crack down on prostitution, by driving it further underground.

You would think that such common sense (and the fact that the law makes this clear as well) would have, perhaps, sunk in by now. But, alas, common sense doesn't get you headlines in the paper.

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David Nichols made this lovely Asus Wireless Router WL-520-GU-based Twitter client. OpenWRT runs Python off of a USB thumb drive. The script fetches the 20 most recent tweets from his followers and displays them using a Sparkfun serial based LCD. The laser parts were fabbed at Ponoko.com.

Tweetser

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Hugh Pickens writes "Last week Gizmodo had a special celebration of 1979, the last year before a digital tsunami hit, that put Bill Gates in a nostalgic mood this week. Bill chimed in with his own memories of that seminal year when everything changed. 'In 1979, Microsoft had 13 employees, most of whom appear in that famous picture that provides indisputable proof that your average computer geek from the late 1970s was not exactly on the cutting edge of fashion,' wrote Gates. 'By the end of the year we'd doubled in size to 28 employees. Even though we were doing pretty well, I was still kind of terrified by the rapid pace of hiring and worried that the bottom could fall out at any time.' What made Gates feel a little more confident was that he began to sense that BASIC was on the verge of becoming the standard language for microcomputers. 'By the middle of 1979, BASIC was running on more than 200,000 Z-80 and 8080 machines and we were just releasing a new version for the 8086 16-bit microprocessor. As the numbers grew, we were starting to think beyond programming languages, too, and about the possibility of creating applications that would have real mass appeal to consumers.' Gates remembers that in 1979 there were only 100 different software products that had more than $100 M in annual sales and all of them were for mainframes. 'In April, the 8080 version of BASIC became the first software product built to run on microprocessors to win an ICP Million Dollar Award. Today, I would be surprised if the number of million-dollar applications isn't in the millions itself' writes Gates. 'More important, of course, is the fact that more than a billion people around the world use computers and digital technology as an integral part of their day-to-day lives. That's something that really started to take shape in 1979.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The most exciting development to come out of Comic-Con this year? Creator Bryan Lee O'Malley dropping news that Ubisoft Montreal is currently developing a PS3/Xbox 360 downloadable game based on his comic series Scott Pilgrim (above), to be released alongside Edgar Wright's film adaptation -- news of a magnitude that almost nearly canceled out the disappointment of EA's contest calling for systematic and institutionalized harassment of SDCC booth babes for prizes. Elsewhere on Offworld, we rounded up more of the best films Netflix's Xbox 360 streaming service has to offer, with Zach Galifanakis' dystopian cult comedy Visioneers and more multilayered time-warping and epic human-drama documentary films than you could ever want, and a bonus comedic British invasion. We also figured out how to get a taste of the PS3 Katamari Damacy remake on display at Comic-Con from the comfort of our living rooms, saw new footage of the giant crab battles and near-avoidance baby violence of 'conjure anything' DS game Scribblenauts and of Gearbox's Mad-Max-ian post-apocalyptic co-op open world shooter Borderlands (which promises '87 bazillion' procedurally generated weapons). Finally, we saw chiptune punk stars Anamanaguchi plan their U.S. domination summer tour, got the first look at UK indie Mode7's abstract tactical strategy game Frozen Synapse, and our 'one shot's for the day: No More Heroes in 3D 2D pixels, and Noby Noby Boy's essence in just nine words.

Follow this excellent step-by-step instructional video by Minimak and you, too, can have a blindingly awesome infrared LED sombrero. It may not thwart the sneaky paparazzi, but at least you'll look out-of-sight in all that convenience store surveillance footage.

[via WonderHowTo]

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An anonymous reader writes "RSA Conference released the results of a recent survey of security professionals regarding the critical security threats and infrastructure issues they currently face, including those exacerbated by the current economic climate. The study indicates that even though practitioners are most concerned about email phishing and securing mobile devices, technologies addressing these needs are at risk of being cut from IT budgets. The survey also asked what technology investments will likely be bypassed or curtailed due to spending freezes and budget cuts."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

You hear a lot of talk about piracy in the developing world, about Nigerian markets filled with bootleg DVDs or Chinese iPod knockoffs.

But if you want to see what real piracy looks like, look at the bio-pirates, people and corporations who receive patents on common life-forms from the developing world (abetted by the sleepy and lackadaisical US Patent and Trademark Office) and then use their might and muscle to tax people for growing, consuming and exporting the plants they've lived with for centuries, on the grounds that these plants are now some rich person's property.

One such injustice is finally drawing to a close. US Patent Number 5,894,079, belonging Colorado's Larry Proctor, has been struck down. Proctor brought home some yellow beans from a Mexican market and filed for a patent on them in the 1990s, neglecting to tell the USPTO that the beans had been a dietary staple in latinamerica for over a century.

Proctor called them "Enola beans" and began to receive a toll on every Enola bean imported into the US from latinamerica. He used this money to fund a series of defenses to challenges on his patent. Because the patent system continues to enforce challenged patents while the gears of litigation turn, for every year that went by, Proctor found himself richer and better-able to fund his defense, while the people who had grown and eaten the beans for a century got poorer.

Proctor still has the right to appeal his patent up to the Supreme Court, of course.

CIAT officials said that, while they were concerned about the immediate economic impact of the Enola patent, more broadly, they worried that the patent would establish a precedent threatening public access to plant germplasm-the genetic material that comprises the inherited qualities of an organism-held in trust by CIAT and research centers worldwide.

The CIAT genebank is one of 11 maintained worldwide by the CGIAR, where crop materials such as seeds, stems and tubers are held in trust with the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). The genebanks house a total of about 600,000 plant varieties in publicly accessible collections, which are viewed as the pillar of global efforts to conserve agriculture biodiversity and maintain global food security. Plant breeders in both the public and private sectors are constantly seeking access to these resources to help them breed new types of crop varieties, particularly when existing varieties are threatened by pests or disease.

US Patent Office rejects US company's patent protection for bean commonly grown by Latin American farmers' (Thanks, Carolina!)

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.

The Hartman Center at Duke University has just launched AdViews, a collection of thousands of TV commercials from the 1950s-1980s, all from the archives of ad agency D'Arcy Masius Benton & Bowles. Early spots for IBM computers, Hasbro, Squibb, and a bunch of others are here. I especially enjoyed the Pampers spots; the narrative in them is so hilariously forced, it's almost porn-like. These ads don't promote a brand so much as the concept of disposability -- still a new idea at the time.

Unfortunately, the videos aren't nearly as accessible as the print ads in the other Duke/Hartman archives--they're on an iTunes channel, which allows for downloading but not much else. The archive is still a work in progress, though, and greater accessibility is planned for the future.

(Thanks, Skip!)

Gerrit points out this simple yet quite helpful tool he made for keeping squirrelly surface mount parts in place for soldering -

This simple tool will change your life. I was lucky to learn how to solder surface mount from a master. He had crafted a tool very similar to this for himself and used it daily. The design is simple, a weighted pin is attached to a piece of round stock and this holds the part down on the board. Using this tool I soldered an entire surface mount board with no errors on my first try.

Very cool - perhaps teaching your family to solder surface mount parts is the logical next step? ;) Head over to Gerrit's blog for the basic instructions.

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Having used Spotify a bit, I can definitely see how some people think it could potentially replace iTunes completely. It basically acts like an iTunes that has access to millions of songs at no additional cost (and, yes, it's all licensed and legal). The songs are streamed, but you almost never notice it. It really does feel just like iTunes, while also having "Pandora-like" features for creating specialized stations or sharing others' playlists. Unfortunately, it's only available in the UK for now, though the rumor is it will be available in the US before the end of the year. However, where things could get really impressive is with Spotify's mobile app. For a few months, there's been a YouTube video of Spotify Mobile on Android: The demo highlights the fact that you can sync any playlist for "offline" play, solving the biggest question about weak mobile signals on the go, or how you use it on a plane or somewhere without wireless access. With offline syncing, it's basically everything that an iPod can do -- with access to 6 million songs without having to pay for each individual song. But, of course, Android is still a limited platform. The big fish these days is the iPhone App Store, and Spotify has now submitted an iPhone app for approval, which raises all sorts of questions. With Apple's history of rather arbitrary rejections -- including ones for things Apple has deemed "competitive" -- will it block Spotify as a rather direct competitor to iTunes? That would be very unfortunate, and again demonstrate the risk of a closed platform.

That said, the initial reviews of the iPhone app seem quite strong. Eliot Van Buskirk at Wired loves the syncing feature, and warns that "you'd have to pry it out of my cold, dead iPhone before I'll delete it from my phone." Meanwhile Music Ally points out that Spotify has uploaded a video of the iPhone app as well: It really does look pretty slick. So now the ball's in Apple's court. I have no idea if Spotify can survive as a business (and I suspect that the royalty rates the music industry wants will make that difficult), but it is great to see more innovation in the space. Now we get to see how Apple feels about that sort of innovation.

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JohnSmedley sent in a story about what might be the last SciFi film worth caring about this summer. He writes "Wired has an interesting piece up on the upcoming District 9 release. District 9 rose from the ashes of a failed Halo movie and expands on 'Alive in Jo'Burg' which is a South African short film by Blomkamp. Both the short and full feature films expand and explore a premise in which aliens in space are treated as badly as illegal immigrants and the underclass. The story begins as a damaged alien craft lands in Africa. The foreign race is quarantined in a remote area called District 9, and from there are subjected to xenophobia, and the desire of a multi-national conglomerate to steal their technology. The film is an exploration of what would happen in terms of segregation between an alien race and humans, subjecting the stranded visitors to the very human condition of greed, fear, and exploitation. District 9 will be in theatres on August 14'th, and you can view the trailers from the viewpoint of Multi-National United."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

MAKE subscriber Tom, of Hobgob Electronics, writes:

I thought you guys might like to check out my latest project. It's a pair of musical MIDI-enabled sneakers. You can use them to trigger sounds/samples, or control pretty much anything that you can connect to a computer or Arduino. It's a relatively straightforward project, and has tons of potential for expansion and modification.

Musical MIDI Shoes

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levicivita writes "From the down-but-not-out NYT comes an article (warning: login may be required) about user backlash against Kindle's embedded DRM: 'Last week, Jeffrey P. Bezos, chief executive of Amazon, offered an apparently heartfelt and anguished mea culpa to customers whose digital editions of George Orwell's "1984" were remotely deleted from their Kindle reading devices. Though copies of the books were sold by a bookseller that did not have legal rights to the novel, Mr. Bezos wrote on a company forum that Amazon's "'solution' to the problem was stupid, thoughtless and painfully out of line with our principles."' Bezos's post is here."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In response to my Your soldering tips post, "Gizmo" at CircuitGizmos Labs sent this little write-up on creating your own solder dispensing tube using the little tube containers found at hobby and craft stores. - Gareth

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It is very easy to make a small solder dispenser. This is nice way to keep solder in your toolbox or pocket without it becoming tangled, crushed, or unruly. The solder coil is protected in the transparent container, the end of the solder feeds out of the top of the tube for use.

The little container I use was purchased at a hobby store. You might also look in the bead supply department of craft stores. The Sharpie is the right diameter to use as a form for wrapping the solder. A pencil will also work, but produce a smaller coil. A larger coil holds the most solder and prevents "bunching up" as the solder is dispensed. My big roll of solder is perched on a CD holder spindle that's weighted on the bottom.

A small hole is drilled in the container's cap. An 1/8 inch hole works well.

Slip the end of the solder into the cap of the Sharpie to hold it in place. The solder runs from the Sharpie's lid down the length of the marker.

Wrap the solder back over itself, coiling the solder toward the cap of the Sharpie. When finished, clip the solder close to the body of the marker. Remove the marker lid and free the coil of solder.

Insert the end of the solder that was held by the Sharpie lid through the drilled hole in the container. Assemble the dispenser by sliding the coil into the clear body tube.

The plastic containers come several to a pack. This allows you to make several and scatter them wherever you might need solder, or dedicate one to lead-free solder. One improvement might be to glue a magnet to the bottom of the tube - the magnet, stuck to an appropriately heavy object, would help hold the solder dispenser in place as you use it.

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This weekend, I discovered to my absolute delight that Sue Townsend had published another volume in the Adrian Mole diaries, a series I have followed since I was a teenager. The new book, The Lost Diaries of Adrian Mole, 1999-2001, was published in hardcover in 2008, but I missed it until now -- it's just been released in paperback.

The Adrian Mole diaries start with The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13 3/4 (published when I was about 13 3/4, explaining, in part why I've found these books so compelling over the years) and they chronicle the improbable adventures of Adrian Mole, a lower-middle-class would-be intellectual from the English lowlands. Adrian's life is plagued by parental insanity, poor romantic relationships, ill-advised pregnancies, angry pensioners whom Adrian inevitably ends up caring for, doctors frustrated by his hypochondria, and a streak of hilarious and painful self-sabotage as wide as Basil Fawlty's.

In The Lost Diaries, we get a bit of in-fill on the series, a documenting of the years leading up to the War on Terror, during which Adrian reaches a low point, living as a single father in a terrible council estate, his parents again divorced (then remarried, then divorced, then remarried), his two sons stuck in a miserable educational situation, and his finances and mood in the pits of despair.

But Adrian soldiers on, as he always does, blissfully unaware of the comedy in his tragedy, writing a terrible kids' story about pigs, another terrible murder comedy about builders; discovering globalism's seedy underbelly through the lens of a road-size fry-stand where he meets truckers bound for and from every part of the Eurasian landmass; contending with pernicious headlice, authoritarian schoolmasters, foot-and-mouth, and a petrol shortage, and all the while chronicling it all in Townsend's deadpan style.

I purely love these books, every word of every one of them. Townsend's gift is to make you choke with laughter and tears at once, to create a nebbishy antihero who is both terrible and lovable, and to torture him mercilessly for our benefit and edification. And I was fantastically happy to see at notice at the book's end that another volume is due in November, Adrian Mole, the Prostrate Years.

The Lost Diaries of Adrian Mole, 1999-2001

A few weeks back there was a lot of news over a former Goldman Sachs programmer who was arrested by the FBI for supposedly "stealing code" he had worked on while at GS. The headlines made a big deal over the importance of this software, talking about how its proprietary nature could represent a "huge loss" for the banking giant. That struck me as typical journalistic hyperbole, and it's great to see the NY Times actually be the one to step in with an op-ed from a programmer who points out how blown out of proportion this story likely is compared to the real issue. The op-ed piece makes two key points: (1) It's pretty common for programmers to keep copies of their code, if only to be able to refer back to it and (2) the code, by itself, isn't really all that useful. He notes that simply reusing someone else's code really doesn't help much -- and what most companies want is better code that is better suited to what their approach is -- meaning that they want the know-how of the programmer, not the old code.

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An anonymous reader writes "The UK's Met Office Hadley Centre and University of East Anglia have been refusing access to the data used for their global climate averages and scientific studies. A copy of the data has leaked, and attempts continue to accomplish the release of the data by whoever maintains it. Excuses have included confidentiality agreements which cannot be verified because no records were kept, mention of the source has been removed from the Met Office web site, and IPCC records were destroyed."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It can be really difficult to see those little components when surface mount soldering. Bring in the funny looking headgear! Some type of head-mounted magnification is a great solution, but it isn't always the best choice. You might want to invest in a stereoscopic microscope. A microscope will give you more magnification and the ability to go from a magnified view to an unmagnified view more easily, and hands free. They're great for checking traces, solder joints, and many other solder-related tasks. The down side is they can be very expensive, running upwards of $500 or more. The good news is they can be picked up used for very little money.

Long story short, I picked up this beautiful stereo microscope for only $20 on eBay. Now that's a deal! One of the nice things about this model is the ability to swing the entire head to the side, almost like a boom-style, except it's about $1000 less. I love it! I still use my magnifying glasses headset, but having a microscope has been very useful and it didn't break the bank.

Do you have any other great tips, finds, or stories about places to get inexpensive equipment? Share your insight with all our readers in the comments below. Thanks!

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A few folks have submitted the news that apparently AT&T is blocking access to a certain subdomain of 4chan. I just checked on my own AT&T DSL account and it's true that I can't get there via AT&T (I can get there if I don't go via AT&T). That doesn't mean that AT&T definitely is blocking it, but there are reports that folks at AT&T have admitted that it's true. If you don't know what 4chan is, the 4chan Wikipedia page is probably the best way to understand it. Even if the site is controversial for some, it does seem quite extreme for AT&T to do an outright block, without any official warning or immediate explanation. Outright blocking of websites, without recourse and without a clear explanation of why is extremely questionable and the sort of "net neutrality" violation that the FCC would likely come down hard against. If it's true that there's a block, perhaps AT&T is assuming that no one serious (such as the FCC) would come to the defense of 4chan, but that might be a mistake (in part because AT&T probably won't like what happens when 4chan decides to come to its own defense). Hopefully this will be explained away as a mistake. So far, the best explanation I've seen is (via 4chan) the claim that the subdomain was involved in some sort of DDoS attack, but you would think that, if that were the case, AT&T would have just made that clear from the beginning. Not coming out with a clear and concise explanation just looks bad, and seems to be stirring up 4chan folks to make a statement -- something AT&T almost certainly does not want. AT&T may be able to tap your phones, but getting on the wrong side of 4chan seems like a bad, bad idea.

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Ricoh has released the GR Digital III premium compact camera with a fast f1.9 28mm equivalent prime lens. Successor to the GR Digital II, it uses a new 10MP sensor with larger pixel pitch than its predecessor. It continues the Ricoh tradition of high resolution screens, becoming the first compact to offer a 920,000 dots VGA panel. A new imaging engine, in combination with the more sensitive sensor promises to improve high ISO performance. It also gains faster AF and a 'full-press snap' mode that jumps to a preset focus distance for fast street shooting. It can also shoot a burst of up to 5 RAW files in continuous or bracketing mode.

holdenkarau writes "Several news sources (Mashable, The Inquistr, etc.) are reporting that AT&T is blocking img.4chan.org in the southern united states. That server is used for the infamous /b/ board (the home of anonymous). TechCrunch calls the decision to block 4chan 'stupid,' noting that they may have 'opened perhaps the most vindictive, messy can of worms.' The Inquisitr suggests that 'The global internet censorship debate landed in the home of the free.' moot (who runs 4chan) asks users to call AT&T, while some others suggest more drastic action (like cutting AT&T fiber)."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

John sends us "Rare and unseen footage of Disneyland's construction narrated by Imagineers. Includes some amazing new footage of Walt Disney walking the site before construction even started and some never-before-seen timelapse footage of the park from groundbreaking until opening day. This film was on the way to deep storage and was found by a curious employee, otherwise there's a good chance we'd never get to see this."

This is just fascinating -- a look into the raw bones beneath one of the most polished created environments we have. The narration, from Tony Baxter, Ed Hobleman, and Walter Magnuson, is great. And I'm in heaven over the glimpses of the original Tomorrowland, another top time-traveller destination for me once I develop my Tardis.

Be sure to click through to see the whole thing; this is just part one of five.

Building Walt's Dream - Disneyland Construction Timelapse Video (Thanks, John!)

Barry sez, "One of the most difficult things you encounter when discussing the bailouts is getting people to understand concepts of enormity that are literally beyond comprehension. 'Trillion' is one of those concepts. This visualization (by Jess Bachman, who does the fabulous Death and Taxes poster), goes along way to making the number more understandable. "

Visualizing One Trillion Dollars (Thanks, Barry!)

Here's an Australian physics teacher using principles of molecular physics (the "packing fraction") to "shark" games where you are asked to guess the number of M&Ms (or, presumably, other ellipsoid candy) in a jar.

How to shark a 'guess the number of M&Ms in a jar' contest... (Thanks, Darren!)

Steve Silberman sez, "The Cold War computing race from the Russian side, including the development of the MESM -- for 'Small Electronic Counting Machine' -- powered by more than 6000 vacuum tubes."

Building digital computers in Soviet post-war Russia was a dangerous business. To protect himself and his staff from criticism that could end in them being sent to labour camps, Russian computer pioneer Sergei Lebedev of the Kiev Electro-Technical Institute declared that the computers they wanted to build would carry out only ideologically correct calculations.

Described as 'the Soviet Alan Turing', Lebedev had been thinking about how to build a computer since 1948, and by the end of 1949 he had the basic principles down on paper. In a climate of deep suspicion, Lebedev assembled a team of 12 designers and 15 technicians at a disused monastery at Feofania, near Kiev, and gave it the seemingly ironic name 'Secret Laboratory Number One'...

The Russian System/360 clone was called the ES EVM, and it soon became widely available in Russia. In 1972, the year that the ES EVM was released, Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev virtually admitted what was going on when he told a meeting of officials, "We communists have to string along with the capitalists for a while. We need their credits, their agriculture and their technology."

Theft quickly became the principal way that Russian computing kept pace with the West. In 1975, production began of a clone of the influential DEC PDP-11/40 minicomputer. Called the SM-4, it featured multiple video terminals and twin magnetic tape units - just like the real thing. The SM-4 so faithfully reproduced the original hardware that it even ran Unix, enabling it to run a wide range of stolen applications.

The successor to the SM-4 was the SM-1420. A cloned version of the DEC PDP-11/34+, it was produced in large numbers across the Soviet Union. The standard machine had 256kb of RAM, two 2.5MB removable disc packs, two magnetic tape drives and the ability to handle several video terminals. Predictably, the mid-1980s saw the first cloned Russian IBM PC, called the ES PEVM. It ran DOS and early versions of Windows.

Up until his death last year, my great uncle Bora Rachman was curator of the Popov technology museum in St Petersburg. He let me do a ton of photography the last time I visited him (alas, my camera broke that day, necessitating the use of a crummy phonecam). Lots of shots of handsome old Soviet clunker computers.

Secrets of Communist computing (Thanks, Steve!)

Fun with dry ice - make a dry ice bubble!

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Both via Boston.com's "The Big Picture."

Above (click for large size): A NASA photo of a young Neil Armstrong, 1966. (view the full Apollo mission photoset here).

Below: (click for large size) the longest eclipse of the century, seen beyond a statue of Mahatma Gandhi (Chennai, India, July 22, 2009 - REUTERS/Babu)

(All spotted on missom's blog.)

angry tapir writes "In a laboratory experiment, researchers found that between 55 percent and 100 percent of participants ignored certificate security warnings, depending on which browser they were using (different browsers use different language to warn their users). The researchers first conducted an online survey of more than 400 Web surfers, to learn what they thought about certificate warnings. They then brought 100 people into a lab and studied how they surf the Web. They found that people often had a mixed-up understanding of certificate warnings. For example, many thought they could ignore the messages when visiting a site they trust, but that they should be more wary at less-trustworthy sites."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

bbum's posted the results of his latest project. It looks very tasty:

The sweet essence of persimmon is both present in the nose and in the flavor. And the characteristic astringency of persimmon carries through, too, giving the wine a slight "pucker" at the end...

And this was an exercise in patience. Despite an iffy initial impression, the final result seems to have wowed its maker:

Way back in February, I racked the persimmon wine between the various glass carboys to get it off the yeast poo (lees).

At the time, the two carboys showed 11.5% and 12.5% ABV. Not bad. But it didn't taste very good in early March/April; way too bitter and *bleh*.

So, I let it sit until last week. The flavors have mellowed and, chilled, it is quite a drinkable beverage.

Make: Persimmon Wine Finished!

As a bonus, check out bbum's forced carbonation rig, which he used on a couple bottles of the persimmon wine:

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