Chris Albrecht writes "VoloMedia announced today that it has been awarded what it called the 'patent for podcasting.' According to the press announcement, patent number 7,568,213, titled 'Method for Providing Episodic Media,' covers: '...the fundamental mechanisms of podcasting, including providing consumer subscription to a show, automatically downloading media to a computer, prioritizing downloads, providing users with status indication, deleting episodes, and synchronizing episodes to a portable media device.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It really is amazing to see some of the stories about people shutting off their brains (and often their own eyes) in order to believe everything that their GPS device tells them. The latest example involves some Swedish tourists in Italy, who wanted to go to Capri, but mistyped it into the device as Carpi, an industrial town in Northern Italy, 400 miles away from the beautiful isle of Capri. Apparently, it didn't occur to them as they drove (and drove and drove) that perhaps things weren't right. According to tourist officials, after being informed, the couple got back in the car, and turned around to head in the right direction.

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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 his partner Sally, five animals, too many old cars, and a shed full of crap.

This is a power switch salvaged from an old PC. It is also the switch that most resembles an elephant, beating out its nearest competitor by a factor of 5. In fact, on the SPRS (Standardized Pachyderm Resemblance Scale) it scored an incredible 8.4-- a mammoth only scores 8.2!



Remember this day. One day, your kids will ask where you were when you saw it.

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 his partner Sally, five animals, too many old cars, and a shed full of crap.

This is a power switch salvaged from an old PC. It is also the switch that most resembles an elephant, beating out its nearest competitor by a factor of 5. In fact, on the SPRS (Standardized Pachyderm Resemblance Scale) it scored an incredible 8.4-- a mammoth only scores 8.2!



Remember this day. One day, your kids will ask where you were when you saw it.

Here are some of my recent posts about money for credit.com.

How to Live on $0 a Day: Move Into a Cave Like This Guy: "I've been living without a cent to my name since the autumn of 2000 (with a month's exception during my first year). I don't use or accept money or conscious barter, and I don't take food stamps or other government dole." (Photograph for Details by Mark Heithoff)

Why Tightwads Marry Spendthrifts: "People tend to be attracted to mates with opposing emotional reactions toward spending."

How to Trick Yourself Into Producing the Sense of "Quasi Elation Associated with Pleasurable Experiences": "People prefer pay raises with inflation over pay cuts with stable prices -- even when the two scenarios are financially identical."

Think Being Rich, Good Looking, and Famous Will Make You Happy? You're Wrong: "Achieving 'materialistic and image-related' goals, such as wealth and fame, can have negative consequences like 'headaches, stomachaches, and loss of energy'"

Feeling Blue? Try Counting Some Money: "The next time you find yourself down in the dumps, grab a stack of money (it doesn't even have to be your own) and count it. According to the results of a new study, it'll cheer you up."

Avoid Unplanned Charges with Single Use Credit Cards: "A website called DazzleWhite Pro lures you into filling out a form for a "free" sample of a teeth whitening product, then starts charging your credit card $58.76 per month for the stuff."

How to Succeed by Not Eating Marshmallows: "I'm going to leave the room for fifteen minutes. When I return, if you have not eaten the marshmallow, I'll give you another one and then you can eat them both."

Our Tendency to Believe Confident People Over Cautious People: "People have a statistically significant tendency to prefer the advice of confident advisers even after those advisers demonstrate themselves to be unreliable."

Hugh Pickens writes "The Associated Press reports that the companies that own almost half the nation's nuclear reactors are not setting aside enough money to dismantle the reactors so many plants may sit idle for decades posing safety and security risks as a result. The shortfalls in funding have been caused by huge losses in the stock market that have devastated the companies' savings and by the soaring costs of decommissioning. Owners of 19 nuclear plants have won approval to idle their reactors for as long as 60 years, presumably enough time to allow investments to recover and eventually pay for dismantling the plants and removing radioactive material. But mothballing nuclear reactors or shutting them down inadequately presents the risk that radioactive waste could leak from abandoned plants into ground water or be released into the air, and spent nuclear fuel rods could be stolen by terrorists. The NRC has contacted 18 nuclear power plants to clarify how the companies will address the recent economic downturn's effects on funds to decommission reactors in the future but some analysts worry the utility companies that own nuclear plants might not even exist in six decades."

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 his partner Sally, five animals, too many old cars, and a shed full of crap.

My previous rant about an advertising campaign had pretty mixed results, so let's try again. This time I want to talk about the television campaign for Microsoft's new search engine, Bing.

My problem with these ads is that they rely on one of the oldest, hoariest advertising tricks in the book: make up the disease, then sell the cure. This has been done for years; occasional bad breath became the dread disease "halitosis" in the 1930s, thanks to Listerene (which had previously been sold as, among other things, a dandruff tonic), for example. Now Microsoft is going to save us from "Search Overload Syndrome."



Now, I know they're not thinking I'm going to take this literally, that using (implied) Google is going to make me into some free-associating loon with no self-control, but that doesn't mean I have to like it. It feels like they're just trying a bit too hard to find something to gripe about. What are they suggesting? Google gives too much information? And all that information will destroy your brain?

They could have been onto something if Bing actually did anything remarkably different. I've been playing with it, trying to see if normal searches returned something profoundly more relevant, but so far I can't tell the difference. Now that I'm nice and terrified of getting Search Overload Syndrome (SOS), I'd be a fool not to be equally afraid of Bing. In fact, to be really safe, I should just start calling the reference desk at my local library and let that smug librarian risk her brain and social life with all that mind-destroying web searching.

I guess the real lesson here is that if you're going to make up a disease to scare people with, it should have at least some kind of plausibility, otherwise, who's going to be scared? It's like trying to sell a pill to keep people from getting Dutch Elm Disease; we're just not worried about it.

With our CwF + RtB experiment in full swing, we've asked some of the participants involved to provide some guest posts. The post here is from James Boyle, whose book, The Public Domain is a part of our Techdirt Book Club (signed by Boyle). If you order both the Techdirt Book Club and the Techdirt Music Club before midnight PT, August 3rd, we'll throw in a free Techdirt hoodie, or a free lunch with Mike. We asked Boyle to give his thoughts on new media business models from his perspective, and he came back with this incredibly thought-provoking post that ought to create quite a bit of conversation:

The Associated Press recently released the details of their plan to develop a new metadata/Digital Rights Management format for news stories. (It wasn't described as DRM, but I agree with Techdirt that it certainly sounds that way.) Particularly ominous was this phrase "The system will register key identifying information about each piece of content that AP distributes as well as the terms of use of that content, and employ a built-in beacon to notify AP about how the content is used." (My italics) Even those without a strong dose of civil libertarian paranoia might bridle at the thought of having their practices of reading and sharing newspaper articles tracked by a central repository (other than Google, that is.) "He sure is reading a lot of articles about gay rights!" Pamela Samuelson calls DRM'd articles "texts that rat on you." Somehow it doesn't sound like a good slogan for a sales campaign. (AP says it has no interest in tracking on the individual user level.)

The response of the tech-savvy was, predictably, pretty savage. Techdirt ("it's difficult to think of anything quite this useless") at least offered some principles on which sustainable web businesses might be built. Others were not as kind. Someone even created an extremely profane and sometimes juvenile, but nevertheless quite funny anonymous graphical translation of the AP's diagram to explain the new plan. The criticisms of the plan (clueless graphics aside) centered around two tenets that are familiar to Techdirt readers.

1. an argument that DRM is a.) doomed to fail technologically and b.) has in fact already failed in social and economic practice. The general line here is that the arc of history bends towards technologies that are copy-friendly and anything that tries to turn that feature into a bug will soon fail if it hasn't already.
2. an assertion that "old media" (other names include "the clueless" "dinosaurs" "non digital natives" "the walking dead" etc.) are demonstrably incapable of understanding the potential upside of the sharing economy, or copy-friendly technologies, still less the business models that can be built on top of them. This tenet is so sweeping that it would be much harder to defend if history didn't give us such fabulous anecdata to back it up. My own favourite quote was about the technology that lowered the cost of copying in a prior technological era, "The VCR is to the movie industry what the Boston strangler is to the woman alone." That was Jack Valenti, the late head of the MPAA. Actually, unless the answer to that puzzle is "What is a savior?" Mr. Valenti would turn out to be wrong. Movie rentals to fill the -- cheap -- VCR's that the movie industry had failed to criminalize, tax or enjoin soon provided more that 50% of the industry's revenue.

Personally, I am at best agnostic about tenet #1. I am not a technological determinist. I think that DRM has failed spectacularly in some areas (root kits on CD's), provoked mild irritation and a pressure towards more open alternatives in others (the move towards selling open MP3's rather than protected streams or DRM'd iTunes tracks) and become standard (even if not loved) in others. Most of you are still being forced to watch the FBI warnings on your DVD's and fuss with region control. Sure you could get around it. But how many people bother to? Life is too short. I do think news is a particularly bad candidate for DRM or even "beacons," but that is a specific judgement not a general one.

On tenet #2, I think we are thinking too narrowly. Behavioral economists have identified specific deviations from economic rationality in human psychology-- we tend to value potential losses asymmetrically from potential gains, to use simple heuristics even when they are shown to be false and so on. In my new book, The Public Domain (freely available online, of course) I argue that we have a measurable cognitive bias against "openness" -- I call it cultural agoraphobia, and I argue that it impedes us in understanding the creative potential, productive processes and forms of social organization that the web makes possible. The source of that bias (by which I mean a demonstrated tendency to ignore certain kinds of possibilities in a way that the data does not support) probably lies in the fact that most of our experiences with property come from physical goods -- sandwiches that 1000 people cannot share, absent divine intervention, fields that might be overgrazed or underused if not subject to single entity control. Even digital natives still spend most of the hours of their day in a world in which goods are both "rival" and "excludable." Reflexes picked up in that world tend to lead us astray when we are dealing with the kind of property that lives on networks. "Like astronauts brought up in gravity, our reflexes are poorly suited for free fall." I would even argue that this cognitive bias, even more than industry capture of regulators, is one reason why our current intellectual property policy is so profoundly and utterly misguided. But its implications are wider still.

So far, this sounds similar to the standard technophilic critique of existing institutions -- albeit with a behavioral psychology chaser. But it isn't. Just because it's a bias doesn't mean it's always wrong. It may be that, even once one discards the bias, there may be no immediately obvious way of carrying important social functions into the world of the Net. I don't care where on the techno-optimist spectrum you are (It ranges from "get their eyeballs and their wallets will surely follow" to "the only alternative you seem to be proposing is Google ads, cover charges and lots of T-shirts.") Unless you believe that markets spontaneously self-correct for everything (hint, check your IRA balance before you answer this question) you have to acknowledge that the problem that the AP is responding to may be our problem (how to pay for the kind of expensive investigative journalism that is a real boon to democracy and liberty) as well as their problem (how not to die in the immediate future.)

Don't get me wrong. The world of the future will clearly have media that in some respects are far better than what we have today, even when measured against the most rigorous standards. I am pretty sure, in the world of 2020, pollution levels in Silicon Valley and school performance in Palo Alto will be covered with a wealth of data, expert systems, and interactive mapping in a way that would have seemed a dream in 1990. That will be true for most areas that have wealth, a wealth of data, and a highly educated citizenry with lots of personal liberty and strong personal and ethical reasons to be focused on a particular subject. It will be much less true for areas where those conditions do not hold true, particularly if you have a powerful in-group with strong reasons to want to keep the eyes of the world away. Twitter and the camera phone can do a lot. But they can provide neither the culture of professional journalism, nor the sustained effort and resources to develop a story over years. And there is an oft unnoticed corollary to the claim that the dinosaurs are clueless. It means they are unlikely to solve the problems themselves. Unless you think that markets and technologies spontaneously self-correct for everything, that leaves the rest of us.

In Robert Putnam's fascinating book Bowling Alone he describes the way in which the threads of civil society and of trust frayed during the 20th century -- and offered a convincing social science case that the implications were profoundly negative for our culture. But the book was not a depressive one. Putnam pointed back to the turn of the 20th century. Then, as now, people noticed their society changing around them -- industrialization, the acceleration of migration to cities, urban isolation. But Putnam points out that this prompted an extraordinary entrepreneurialism in civil society. Groups were founded that today seem quaint to us -- the Kiwanis. the Rotarians and so on -- all aimed specifically and solving this failure of civil society. The message was not, in other words, that these problems would self correct through markets and technology. It was that we would need an entrepreneurialism outside the market -- one that experimented with institutions and communities to solve the problems of the day. For me, a glance at AP's DRM business plan prompts the same thought. Some of the functions that newspapers now perform are going to be located elsewhere in society -- in universities, in foundations, in government, in blogs. Some of that will happen spontaneously -- but a lot of it will not unless we innovate in social organization the same way the citizens of the early 20th century did to meet the problems of urbanization.

I was lucky enough to be involved with Creative Commons from its inception and to help found Science Commons and ccLearn. Those organizations were designed to solve a particular problem for which there was a market and legal gap -- the problem of failed sharing. Jesse Dylan's brilliant video on the subject explains it better than I could. Are there equivalent institutional innovations that could help in the area of news gathering? I don't know. Journalism isn't my field. But without the kind of institutional innovation and experimentation in civil society that Creative Commons (or the Kiwani's) represented, I think that we are unlikely to solve its problems. Web 2.0 business methods alone, even with a Techdirt crystal ball, will not be enough. If I am right, mocking the clueless will be a poor consolation.

James Boyle is William Neal Reynolds Professor of Law at Duke and the author of The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind. He writes a regular column for the Financial Times and tweets sporadically as thepublicdomain.

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In this Ignite talk, social roboticist Heather Knight talks about her work at JPL. The talk feels a bit rushed, but you can explore more about the projects she mentions at her website (link below).

Marilyn Monrobot

From MAKE magazine:

In MAKE, Volume 19: Robots, Rovers, and Drones, learn how to make a model plane with an autopilot and a built-in robot brain. We'll also show you how to make a comfortable chair and footstool out of a single sheet of plywood, a bicyclist's vest that shows how fast you're going, and projects that introduce you to servomotors. All this, and plenty more, in MAKE, Volume 19! If you're a subscriber, your copy should be shipping in the next few days; newsstand date is August 18th.

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fast66 writes "The White House may lift its policy barring federal Web sites from tracking users' online behavior. In place since 2000, the cookie policy issued by the Office of Management and Budget was intended to protect citizen privacy but has sparked criticism — even from White House officials — for hampering citizen outreach. On Friday, Bev Godwin, the director of online resources and interagency development at the White House's new media office, blogged on the White House Web site, 'We want to use cookies for good, not evil' — and invited the public to comment on cookies through various online channels, including the Office of Science and Technology Policy blog."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Just spent an hour at a Starbucks in NY with Jeff Jarvis of BuzzMachine. We talked about a lot of stuff, mostly about news and tech. Toward the end of the conversation he asked if I had any advice for his 17-year-old son Jake, who is already a successful software entrepreneur, having developed and sold a Facebook app for a fair amount of money, esp for such a young man.

Here's the advice I offered:

1. Be a user. Develop apps you yourself have a use for. If you don't have a feeling for what it's like to be a user, you'll never know how to evolve the products, and the stuff you learn in #2 will never make sense.

2. Listen to users. Learning how to code is straightforward, it takes time to perfect your skills, but it's relatively easy compared to the skill of listening. I recently suggested to a VC friend that we start a company whose sole differentiator is that it strives to perfect the art of listening to users. I feel that it would pretty much have the market of user-driven tech to itself. This doesn't mean that you get your drive from users, that has to come from your creativity, but it does mean you get your grounding from them. Without connecting with users, your products have no purpose.

Someday maybe I'll teach a course for software engineers on these two skills. It would be challenging, but out the other end would probably come a handful of really powerful entrepreneurial software people.

I first started making kombucha in 1995, but when we had our first child in 1997, I was knocked out of many patterns, including making this tasty fermented beverage. About a month ago I started making it again. It's really easy.

Before you make your own kombucha, here are a few reasons why you might not want to:

• Paul Stamets: "The danger of misuse should be a prevailing concern for us all"
• CDC: Unexplained severe illness possibly associated with consumption of kombucha tea
• Journal of Intensive Care Medicine: A case of kombucha tea toxicity

Why do I drink it? Because it's fun to make and the flavor is almost addictive. The benefits outweigh the risks, at least for me. Here's how I make it. (Click on photos for enlargement.):

1. Get some live kombucha. I foolishly paid $25 to an online store that sells the culture in little vials (as seen above). As I later found out, you can buy a bottle of kombucha for a few dollars at grocery store and use that as your starter. If you have a friend who makes it, ask them for a "mother" (the floppy, blobby, disc that floats on top of a batch of kombucha) and a cup of the kombucha tea.

2. Collect the ingredients: sugar, vinegar (or a half cup of the kombucha tea from your last batch), tea bags (any kind). I used green tea for my first batch, but I'm now using decaf black tea.

3. Add 4-8 tea bags into a little less than one gallon of water. I used filtered water and a ceramic crock. I've heard you shouldn't use metal containers to make kombucha. Let it steep for a while. You can use hot water to steep the tea, but let it cool down before you add any culture (to prevent killing it).

4. Stir in 1 or 1 and 1/2 cups of sugar. The sugar is the fuel for the kombucha microbes. I have been using one cup of sugar, but in the batch I started yesterday I used one and one-half cups because I want it to be stronger and more vinegary. I have heard that the more sour it is, the more resistant it is to bacterial infection. (How do you like my hand carved spoon?)

5. Stir in 1/2 cup of kombucha from your last batch, or 1/4 cup of vinegar and a vial of expensive kombucha culture you foolishly purchased over the Internet.

6. Cover crock with cloth for a week. If a "mushroom" (not a real mushroom) has grown on the surface, that means it worked! Save the mushroom and use it to cover your next batch. In a week, the mushroom will have another mushroom attached to it that you can peel off and use, discard, or give away.

7. Transfer the tangy, fizzy beverage into a bottle and refrigerate. Some websites say not to store kombucha in plastic but I like this one gallon bottle.

If you have any tips to share about kombucha, please put them in the comments.

I've been pointing out why an open platform beats a closed platform over the long haul with regards to the iPhone, and linking to various stories concerning the arbitrary nature of being allowed (or not) on the iPhone. But, Harry McCracken, over at Technologizer, does a great job illustrating the point by playing the "what if" game, and thinking about how Windows would have developed had Microsoft similarly controlled every app. It doesn't take long to realize how much slower innovation would likely have been on the PC platform (though, it might have opened up more of an opportunity for other platforms):

Would Microsoft have distributed Microsoft Office rivals such as SmartSuite or WordPerfect Office via its app store?

Well, maybe, in theory at least-after all, it doesn't sell Microsoft Office as part of Windows, so it couldn't use the "it duplicates functionality that's already in the product" excuse. Call me a cynic, though, but I suspect that competitive office suites would have run into trouble if Microsoft had controlled all Windows software distribution. And hey, didn't WordPerfect duplicate features in Notepad?

How about Netscape Navigator?

When Netscape first appeared in 1994, the current version of Windows (3.11) didn't have a browser. Even Windows 95 didn't have one at first--Internet Explorer was part of the extra-cost Plus Pack. Then again, Windows 95 did ship with the dreadful client for the original version of MSN, a proprietary online service which definitely did compete with the Web. That might have been reason enough for Microsoft to nix Navigator for duplicating Windows functionality. And once IE was part of Windows, Microsoft could have given Navigator the boot retroactively.

Safari? Firefox? Chrome?

They all appeared long after Windows got a browser as standard equipment. No, no, and no.

And it goes on from there. Fun thought experiment if you're one of the believers that Apple's closed iPhone system is somehow "good" for innovation.

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suraj.sun writes with an excerpt from this story at Ars Technica that the "Associated Press, reeling from the newspaper apocalypse, has a new plan to 'wrap' and 'protect' its content though a 'digital permissions framework.' The Associated Press last week rolled out its brave new plan to 'apply protective format to news.' The AP's news registry will 'tag and track all AP content online to assure compliance with terms of use,' and it will provide a 'platform for protect, point, and pay.' That's a lot of 'p'-prefaced jargon, but it boils down to a sort of DRM for news — 'enforcement,' in AP-speak."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Lucas123 writes "The location of the safe house used in times of emergency for the First Family was leaked on a LimeWire file-sharing network recently, a fact revealed today to members of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. Along with the safe house location, the LimeWire networks also disclosed presidential motorcade routes, as well as sensitive but unclassified document that listed details on every nuclear facility in the country. Now lawmakers are considering a bill to ban P2P use on government, contractor networks."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

VoloMedia, an online ad tools company, is gleefully declaring that it has been awarded a patent on podcasting. The specific patent, 7,568,213, is for a "Method for providing episodic media content." Not surprisingly, it's a continuation patent (sometimes referred to as a submarine patent) where the claims are changed over time to keep current with what's happening in the market. The patent itself is short, with the main claim being:

A method for providing episodic media, the method comprising: providing a user with access to a channel dedicated to episodic media, wherein the episodic media provided over the channel is pre-defined into one or more episodes by a remote publisher of the episodic media; receiving a subscription request to the channel dedicated to the episodic media from the user; automatically downloading updated episodic media associated with the channel dedicated to the episodic media to a computing device associated with the user in accordance with the subscription request upon availability of the updated episodic media, the automatic download occurring without further user interaction; and providing the user with: an indication of a maximum available channel depth, the channel depth indicating a size of episodic media yet to be downloaded from the channel and size of episodic media already downloaded from the channel, the channel depth being specified in playtime or storage resources, and the ability to modify the channel depth by deleting selected episodic media content, thereby overriding the previously configured channel depth.

I have a lot of trouble understanding how this is possibly patentable. I would think that Dave Winer's work on enclosures for audio content in RSS would be seen as significant prior art. Beyond just the prior art, you have to wonder how this passes the "bilski" test (what was transformed here?) or the KSR/Teleflex test on obviousness (this is simply combining things that were already out there). Still, expect plenty of trouble here. Considering that Volo wasted no time at all in rushing out a press release, expect them to be aggressive with this patent -- without realizing that it may be unleashing significant anger from the podcasting community that it probably doesn't want.

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Science Fair project FOR THE WIN! According to a piece on Wired Science, a 16-year-old high school student, Daniel Burd, from Waterloo, Ontario, has figured out a way to quickly decompose plastic (like that used in shopping bags) by letting bacteria eat it. He presented his findings at the high school science fair.

The Record reports that Burd mixed landfill dirt with yeast and tap water, then added ground plastic and let it stew. The plastic indeed decomposed more quickly than it would in nature; after experimenting with different temperatures and configurations, Burd isolated the microbial munchers. One came from the bacterial genus Pseudomonas, and the other from the genus Sphingomonas.

I like how the piece ends:

Amazing stuff. I'll try to get an interview with this young man who may have managed to solve one of the most intractable environmental dilemmas of our time. And I can't help but wonder whether his high school already had its prom. If he doesn't get to be king, there's no justice in this world.

Teen Decomposes Plastic Bag in Three Months

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The Slashdolt writes "After a stern criticism from Linus, the long-time kernel hacker Alan Cox has decided to walk away as the maintainer of the TTY subsystem of the Linux Kernel, stating '...I've had enough. If you think that problem is easy to fix you fix it. Have fun. I've zapped the tty merge queue so anyone with patches for the tty layer can send them to the new maintainer.'" A response to a subsequent post on the list makes it quite clear that he is serious.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Bill O'Reilly recently invited a couple of pert blond Republican strategists to frighten Fox viewers about Amsterdam's lax pot laws, which have made the city a "mess," and "cesspool of corruption."

The video above was made by a citizen of Amsterdam who used real statistics about drug use in his city compared with drug use in the US.

A Cesspool Of Corruption, Crime (Andrew Sullivan)

UnknowingFool writes "MS has announced the locations of its first two retail stores. The first one will be located at The Shops in Mission Viejo, CA sometime in the fall. There is an existing Apple store at the location. The second one will be located in Scottsdale Fashion Square in Scottsdale, AZ. That location does not have an Apple store. According to Corporate Communications Director Kim Stocks, the locations were picked because they were 'hot markets,' presumably meaning high traffic. Also, the stores will sell laptops, Zunes, Xbox 360s, MS and 3rd party software. No details on which laptops were provided."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The folks at Hobby Media sent us this item:

V8 Supercar driver Rick Kelly is a R/C model cars fan and he recently built the Red Bull Mojet T40, a 1:10 scale replica of the Thrust SSC machine that set the World Land Speed Record on 15 October 1997.

This R/C car is powered by two jet engines, and in May, Rick tried, without success, to break the world land speed record for a remote control car currently held by Nic Case.

Red Bull Xbox 360 Mojet T40

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Here's writer, futurist and all-round dude Karl Schroeder's talk from this year's O'Reilly Open Source Con: "The Rewilding: A Metaphor." In his inimitable style, Karl first describes a semi-human future in which things as abstract as "nature" and "politics" participate directly in the economy and in online discussions, then connects this to open source and open government. It's a hell of a mind-bender, as only Karl can manage. Bravo!

OSCON 09: Karl Schroeder, "The Rewilding: A Metaphor" (via Futurismic)

So, I had said I was going to try to avoid talking about the Tenenbaum file-sharing trial until it was over or unless something major happened, but reading through the reports of the first day it's hard not to declare it to be a train wreck in motion. So far, it appears that Charlie Nesson's argument is that "everybody's doing it!" While I obviously don't know the jury and don't know what else (if anything) Nesson has up his sleeve, that doesn't seem like the sort of argument that's all that convincing. In the meantime, I'm going to do something that I almost never do, and actually agree with entertainment industry lawyer Ben Sheffner (who regularly goes out of his way to misrepresent what I write here) and say that it's unconscionable that Nesson/Tenenbaum don't have an economic expert to testify on the "damages" caused by Tenenbaum. It's not like the idea hasn't been brought up before. Hell, we here had a lengthy discussion on exactly that back in March.

There are numerous economic experts out there who could clearly point out that there's no causal evidence that file sharing does any damage at all. There may be a correlation with a decline in CD sales, but not with any other aspect of the music industry -- and recent research is showing that the overall industry is growing. Even some of the music industry's own research is showing the overall industry is growing -- it's just that spending has shifted. It would have certainly been possible to make a strong case that file sharing alone doesn't cause any significant damage to the industry. They could have shown the recent economic studies, along with evidence of many, many, many artists who have embraced file sharing and used better business models to take that attention to make more money than they had in the past. At that point, they could make the case that it's not piracy that's causing harm to the plaintiffs, but their failure to adapt and embrace better business models. And, from that, show that Tenenbaum's actions didn't cause any direct harm.

But Nesson went on a wild goose chase pursuing "fair use" -- an argument that never really made much sense, and did so in a way that annoyed the judge and pretty much everyone associated with the case. He also screwed up getting the witnesses lined up for the case, only requesting that the author of one of those recent studies be allowed to testify long-past the deadline to do so. And, of course, with fair use being knocked out before the case started, and without any experts to present on damages, and a (so far) defense of "everyone's doing it," you have a recipe for disaster. Nesson seems much more focused on putting the whole RIAA strategy on trial, and seemed to forget that there were specific legal questions that had to be dealt with in this case. As with Jammie Thomas, I think that Tenenbaum is a bad case to go to trial, and I dread the results. At this point, the "best" result may be that they flub the case so badly that super high damages are awarded, and you end up with a repeat of the bad PR that came out following the Jammie Thomas trial (though, things are so twisted so far, I wouldn't be surprised if the RIAA themselves to do their best to convince the jury to keep the award low).

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Justin writes "Many in the industry are counting on Windows 7 to bring the netbook market to the next level. Having netbook manufacturers ship netbooks with 7+ year old Windows XP pre-installed surely deterred some from joining the ranks of households with the small, light and portable netbooks. It seems Microsoft has addressed most of the pitfalls of Windows Vista on a netbook by increasing battery life and performance to be very close to that of the lighter-weight Windows XP. Legit Reviews has the full scoop of battery life and performance tests pitting Windows 7 against Windows XP on the ASUS Eee PC 1005HA Netbook." I'd like to see a follow-up with a few different Netbook-friendly Linux distros, too.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Double Nickels on the Dime, by the Minutemen: One of the greatest American punk records of all time (if not the greatest) was released 25 years ago this month. It was recorded in Venice Beach, right down the street from where Boing Boing Video's studio is located. Above, a 1984 amateur video recording of the band performing a track from this double-album, "Political Song for Michael Jackson." Amazon links, if you care to pick it up: CD or MP3. R.I.P., D. Boon. (via David Rees)

Update: Below, a shot taken of the Minutemen back in the early days, by photog Glen E. Friedman (whose work we've covered in multiple BBV episodes, and who is thanked in the liner notes on Double Nickels).

"It's a photo taken backstage at the Whisky where they were practically the house band in the early 80's," Glen tells us. "They usually had full heads of hair but as a joke shaved them just before this show."

One of Glen's favorite Minutemen songs is after the jump.

brothke writes "Imagine for a moment what his novels would read like if Dan Brown got his facts correct. The challenge Brown and similar authors face is to write a novel that is both compelling and faithful to the facts. In Tetraktys, author Ari Juels is able to weave an interesting and readable story, and stay faithful to the facts. While Brown seemingly lacks the scientific and academic background needed to write such fiction, Juels has a Ph.D. in computer science from Berkeley and is currently the Chief Scientist and director at RSA Laboratories, the research division of RSA Security." Read below for the rest of Ben's review.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This one's a bit old, but Boing Boing just pointed us to the incredible story of a guy named Larry Proctor who was able to get the USPTO to patent some yellow beans he picked up in Mexico. Yes. Really. You can read the patent (5,894,079) here. Thankfully, it was (finally) invalidated last year, but was around for about nine years -- during which time the patent holder basically was able to put a tax on imports of such beans to the US from Mexico:

Yet Proctor actively enforced his patent. At one point, the patent-holder's US$0.6-claim on every pound of yellow beans sold in the United States caused a steep decline in exports of such beans from Mexico to the USA, according to Mexican government sources.

The Boing Boing link points to the story of the USPTO rejecting the patent, but there actually is an update. Just a few weeks ago CAFC also ruled the patent as invalid, noting that Larry Proctor didn't actually do anything special, other than plant some beans he'd picked up. But, none of that stopped 10 years of being able to tax or ban every shipment of these beans into the US. Even beyond the question of why it took 10 years to dump this patent, you have to wonder how a patent on a bean got approved in the first place. Another proud moment by the USPTO.

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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 his partner Sally, five animals, too many old cars, and a shed full of crap.

You know how hard it is to find that perfect gift for that special someone in your life who really wants to get killed by a cop, but doesn't want to actually endanger anybody? I think I may have the answer right here. All you need is $44.95 and probably a time machine back to 1977, because I can't imagine this is legal now.

This ad brings up so many questions: who is this targeted at? Even in a theater prop sort of context, I don't see how the weight and feel would matter. Is it for potential criminals, who want the intimidation of a gun but are hedging their bets if they get caught, it won't be with a deadly weapon? It does say "will fool experts," I bet especially if the "expert" is looking down the barrel of it.

The best line is, of course, "Decorate your den, office, rec-room." I can just imagine it. "Oh, your potpourri bowl artfully strewn with pistols is absolutely wonderful!" A few handguns tossed around in just the right spots really makes a rec-room, too.

The gaming industry's ongoing shift from physical media to direct downloads has made buying new titles much more convenient, and in some cases cheaper. However, as this article in The Escapist notes, there are downsides as well, such as an increased dependence on console makers and the inability to sell your used games. Quoting: "Microsoft and Sony might end up charging publishers an arm and a leg to enable game downloads, especially as they gain more and more control over distribution. Think about it: What if, 10 years from now, 50 percent of software sales for Microsoft's latest console come through Xbox Live? Or, in an even scarier scenario for consumers, what if there is no physical media drive at all, and everything goes through Xbox Live? Sony's marriage to the Blu-ray format ensures its continued support of game discs, but Microsoft has no such restrictions. They could cut console production costs and take control over the entire supply chain in one fell swoop. There would be zero room for publishers to negotiate anything in such a de facto monopoly. The perfect comparison is Wal-Mart. As the world's largest retailer, Wal-Mart is able to demand pretty much whatever it wants of suppliers because it grants access to such large numbers of consumers."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Jonathan Snook shares a simple example that works in Safari, Firefox and even Internet Explorer (using the BasicImage filter). #

Every other week, MAKE's awesome interns tell about the projects they're building in the Make: Labs, the trouble they've gotten into, and what they'll make next.

By Eric Chu, engineering intern

Hammers have been used for millions of years, evolving from a primitive stone tool to the combinations of metals, woods, and plastics commonly seen today. Here's my version in solid steel.

I made this steel hammer in my beginner's manual machining class, for the class final. This is no ordinary hammer. It's roughly twice the weight and size of a normal hammer, so it has lots of power behind it when swung! I made it using a manual lathe and utilizing most of the lathe's tools. Check out my results:

The hammer is actually made of 2 parts: the head and the handle.

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They claim they did, in late 2003.

I'm certainly not a lawyer or an expert in patent law, but it seems the work Adam Curry and I did in creating the format and protocol for podcasting, in 2001, may have inspired their "invention." It certainly predates it.

1/11/01: Payloads for RSS.

Through out 2001 we did trials and experiments to learn how the protocol worked in practice. Radio UserLand, shipped in Jan 2002, was both a podcast distributor and a podcast catcher.

By July 2003, I had helped Chris Lydon boot up his series of podcast interviews with the new bloggers of the day.

All that happened before VoloMedia filed their patent application. Or so it seems.

ReadWriteWeb has a piece on the patent.

Al writes "A team of researchers at the Georgia Institute for Technology say they have developed a way to catch spam before it even arrives on the mail server. Instead of bothering to analyze the contents of a spam message, their software, called SNARE (Spatio-temporal Network-level Automatic Reputation Engine), examines key aspects of individual packets of data to determine whether it might be spam. The team, led by assistant professor Nick Feamster, analyzed 2.5 million emails collected by McAfee in order to determine the key packet characteristics of spam. These include the geodesic proximity of end mail servers and the number of ports open on the sending machine. The approach catches spam 70 percent of the time, with a 0.3 false positive rate. Of course, revealing these characteristics could also allow spammers to fake their packets to avoid filtering."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Mike Hogan says: "Ricardo Cortes, author of the pro-pot children’s book It’s Just a Plant, created an illustrated history of America’s Drug War for vanityfair.com. It tests the assumptions that have led the US to spend $50 billion a year on a military campaign against an unhealthy habit and questions whether Obama’s drug czar, Gil Kerlikowske, has the will or the ability to follow up on his pledge to end the Drug War at long last."

In 1980, Ronald Reagan shifted responsibility for the anti-drug effort from the health department to the Department of Justice. “I would say that this is the most intense federal effort ever against drugs,” said Associate Attorney General Rudolph Giuliani, who oversaw the D.E.A. and the Bureau of Prisons and who orchestrated expansion of the F.B.I. into drug enforcement. Senator Joe Biden began advocating for a Cabinet-level position to coordinate federal agencies—a “drug czar.” So began the era of “zero tolerance.” Reagan’s presidency reversed his predecessors’ drug-control policies, and funding for law enforcement rose to three times that for abuse-prevention and treatment programs.

Sketches of the Drug Czars

The Sweetly Diabolic Art of Jim Flora, edited by Irwin Chusid and Barbara Economon, was published today. Jim Flora was best known as a jazz record cover artist, but he also created many sweetly diabolic magazine illustrations in the 1940s and 1950s. Until Irwin Chusid started curating and assembling art books about Flora several years ago, it was hard to find examples of Flora's work.

Tim Biskup told me the the first time he saw Flora's work (when he was in a used record store) he felt his brain rewiring on the spot, forever changing his approach to art.

Irwin Chusid sent me a PDF of the book a while back and I gave him the following blurb:

"Jim Flora's artwork is ultraviolet radiation in tempera and ink — it crackles with such energy, it practically sizzles ozone."

Jim Flora (1914­-1998), long admired for boisterous 1940s and '50s record cover illustrations and a later series of best-selling children's books, has been rediscovered in recent years as an alchemist of bizarre and politely disturbing imagery. The Sweetly Diabolic Art of Jim Flora burnishes the reputation of one of the great overlooked paintbox fantasists of the twentieth century.

Like its two predecessors (The Mischievous Art of Jim Flora and The Curiously Sinister Art of Jim Flora), this anthology celebrates a visionary whose work is steeped in vari-hued paradox. Flora's figures are fun while threatening; playful yet dangerous; humorous but deadly. His helter-skelter arabesques are clustered with strangely contorted critters of no identifiable species, juxtaposed amid toothpick towers and trombones twisted into stevedore knots. Down his streets lurch demonic mutants sporting fried-egg eyes, dagger noses, and bonus limbs. Yet, despite the raucous energy projected in these hyperactive mosaics, a typical Flora freak circus often projects harmony and balance — an ordered chaos.

The Sweetly Diabolic Art of Jim Flora

Not so long ago, Facebook launched the ability to secure your own "name" as a part of your URL, but it was done in an awkward way where you wouldn't be allowed to change it and there were some rules involved in whether or not certain "fan pages" could actually get their name. Over the last few weeks, I've heard a few stories of people who had to plead their case at friends at Facebook to do something as simple as get to use a name they had been associated with for ages. However, ChurchHatesTucker points us to an amusing situation for the guy who runs the site TrendHunter.com. Apparently, because he didn't have enough "fans" on his fan pages, he couldn't register the name for the account. But he didn't want anyone else taking it... so he used his personal account to grab the "TrendHunter" name. Problem solved? Not quite. Because Facebook, in its infinite wisdom, does not allow you to transfer names you control. So what did he do? Well, he realized the only way to get the name was to file a trademark dispute with Facebook -- and so he did. Yes, he basically filed a trademark claim against himself in order to convince Facebook to transfer the name he registered over to the proper account.

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Recently on Offworld we went deep into the virtual arthouse, as McSweeney's DVD offshoot Wolphin screens a faux-16-bit short, Ledo & Ix, we discovered a quarter-square-mile Second Life art/vinyl toy gallery that never was (above), and we watched the first video of Fig. 8, a game where a bicycle wends its way through "the surreal world of an 'architectural' diagram." We also listened to the delightful electro-pop space opera soundtrack of Sidhe's recent PS3 Breakout/shooter Shatter, poked our head into a recent and awesomely Wareheim-ian chiptunes dance party, and saw Ubisoft officially announce Scott Pilgrim, the game (but offer frustratingly few additional details). Finally, we saw footage of Cryptic Sea's terrifyingly sparse Lunar Lander tribute, a plan to bring Sonic CD to the iPhone, another Japanese indie freeware hit coming to WiiWare, a project to MS Paint a Pikachu, and our 'one shot's for the day: Fallout 3 Wasteland clutter in real life, and an 8-bit dark castle from the depths of the Cube Kingdom.

Instructables user mountainmanna has noticed that used mini-blinds are perfect for re-purposing as plant markers. They're lightweight, rustproof, designed to hold up to continued sun exposure, and have a nice treated surface that takes ink or pencil very well. Her tutorial shows you how to cut them up for use.

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Artist Oscar Diez created this amazing calendar, made of different types of paper and special inks, which is carefully designed to slowly color in the days of the month by capillary action, in real time, over the course of each month. Via Boing Boing.

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BuzzSkyline writes "Traffic jams are minimized if a significant fraction of drivers break the rules by doing things like passing on the wrong side or changing lanes too close to an intersection. The insight comes from a cellular automata study published this month in the journal Physical Review E. In effect, people who disregard the rules help to break up the groups that form as rule-followers clump together. The risk of jamming is lower if all people obey the rules than if they all disobey them, according to the analysis, but jamming risk is lowest when about 40 percent of people drive like jerks."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Instructables user Thinkenstein tours us through his homemade hand-powered washing machine!

I have probably been washing clothes in this hand-powered washing machine for over 25 years. It has two funnels inside the tank that serve as plungers, agitating the water every time the handle is pumped.

The idea was originally for construction in wood. It came from a village technology handbook. I built mine out of iron and cement, and came up with the funnel plunger idea. The rectangular tank uses a special sheet metal with holes for plastering called Hi-rib. It is sealed with a cement-base sealer.

My method is to soak the clothes in detergent and water overnight, pump them for about 5 minutes in the morning, rinse them twice and hang them up on the clothesline.

From the pages of MAKE, Volume 18:

Off-Grid Laundry Machine by Michael Perdriel, pgs. 60-67. Subscribe to MAKE or preview the article in our Digital Edition.

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A lot of copyfighters were mystified by the Associated Press's recent announcement (complete with a bonkers diagram straight off a bottle of Dr. Bronner's) that they had spent millions of dollars on a DRM system for news that would limit how you could paste the text you copied from your browser window.

This is a seeming impossibility, and while there will always be DRM vendors with impossible magic beans to sell to any panicked goofball media dinosaur who'll buy them, it just seemed too weird to think that no one at the AP had said, "Wait, what? This is dumb."

Now Ed Felten has delved into the details that can be gleaned about these magic beans and concludes that AP has made up a bunch of fictional things that their reasonably neat content-management system and microformat can do.

As far as I can tell, the underlying technology is based on hNews, a microformat for news, shown in the AP diagram, that was announced by AP and the Media Standards Trust two weeks before the recent AP announcement.

Unfortunately for AP, the hNews spec bears little resemblance to AP's claims about it. hNews is a handy way of annotating news stories with information about the author, dateline, and so on. But it doesn't "encapsulate" anything in a "wrapper", nor does it do much of anything to facilitate metering, monitoring, or paywalls.

AP also says that hNews " includes a digital permissions framework that lets publishers specify how their content is to be used online". This may sound like a restrictive DRM scheme, aimed at clawing back the rights copyright grants to users. But read the fine print. hNews does include a "rights" field that can be attached to an article, but the rights field uses ccREL, the Creative Commons Rights Expression Language, whose definition states unequivocally that it does not limit users' rights already granted by copyright and can only convey further rights to the user.

AP's DRM Announcement: Much Ado About Nothing

Update: Don't miss Dequed awesome and profane remix of the diagram

In the comments for today's earlier post, Associated Press claims to have discovered magic anti-news-copying beans, BB reader Dequeued points us to this marvellous remix of the Associated Press's DRM system (click through for the whole glorious NSFW thing!).

AP: Protect, Point, Pay

AHuxley writes "Apple suggests that the nation's cellphone networks could be open to 'potentially catastrophic' cyberattacks by iPhone-using hackers at home and abroad if iPhone owners are permitted to legally jailbreak their wireless devices. The Copyright Office is currently considering a request by the Electronic Frontier Foundation to legalize the widespread practice of jailbreaking. Apple has responded to the request by saying that if the 'baseband processor' software — which enables a connection to cell phone towers — is exposed, then a user could crash the tower software, or use the Exclusive Chip Identification number to make calls anonymously. Apple also thinks its closed business model is what made the iPhone a success. The Vodafone scandal from a few years back showed how a network could be compromised, but that was from within. So, what do you think? Is Apple playing the 'evil genius' hacker card or can 'anyone' with a smartphone and a genius friend pop a US cell tower?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

BBG dedicated a series of posts to explore various aspects, gear, and ideas specific "climbing." Here's what went down:

• We examined three types of artificial rock climbing walls.

• Want to climb a tree, like, for real? Here's the pro gear you need.

• Want to climb a mountain instead? Go for this gear.

• HOWTO: overcome common climbing phobias.

• We tested an ultra-light pack stove from Primus.

• We revisited the DIY ice mountain constructed in Alaska.

• What's the best food to take on a climbing/camping expedition? We tried to find out.

• We reviewed three pairs of climbing shoes. Which ones ruled?

Also at BBG:

• We put out mitts all over the HP's latest MediaSmart media server.

• We reviewed the GP2X Wiz, a handheld gaming console we learned is AWESOME.

• Could Apple's long-awaited touch tablet be due in September?

• Advisor: Why GPS is Bad for Lisa's Brain.

• Is AT&T astroturfing on Twitter?

It's quite popular for some bullying lawyers to put a notice on their cease-and-desist letters, declaring that they are confidential and covered by copyright, and that any attempt to publish it or share it with the world will be viewed as copyright infringement. In many ways, this is an incredibly weak attempt by lawyers to avoid the old "Streisand Effect," whereby their cease-and-desist letter becomes the news and draws a lot more attention to what they wanted ceased and desisted. But does that claim mean anything? Typically, not at all. There's typically nothing in a cease-and-desist that would qualify as new and unique enough expression to be covered by copyright (there could be exceptions), and posting a cease-and-desist publicly would most likely be seen as fair use in almost every situation imaginable.

There was, of course, some buzz a year and a half back when a lawyer claimed to have won a copyright ruling over a cease-and-desist letter, but the details showed that was a gross exaggeration. The court had merely noted that the original had in fact been registered by the copyright office (a basic formality).

Still, this doesn't stop law firms from continuing to use this practice. Michael Scott points us to quite the story by the Citizen Media Law folks, concerning a massive cease-and-desist letter from the owners of one newspaper to another. The C&D was questionable enough in the first place. Basically, someone from the San Diego Reader asked for some info from Platinum Equity, a buyout firm that had purchased the competing San Diego Union-Tribune. It involved a sexual harassment lawsuit that Platinum had been involved in, which seems like a perfectly reasonable news story on which to request some information. Platinum did not see it that way and had its lawyers send an amazingly long C&D (the original was six single-spaced pages, which sure beats the typical one-pager found in most C&Ds).

The whole story seems bizarre, as the original request seemed perfectly normal for a news publication, and the company could have come back with a simple no comment. Sending a six page C&D practically screams out for attention -- and it's attention they're getting, despite the claim that publishing the letter would be see as copyright infringement. There's almost no chance that would actually get anywhere in court of course -- especially when it's newsworthy and the information was published by a news publication. Still, it does make you wonder why lawyers still think they can get away with such bullying tactics.

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Rubber-power.com has some really nice, quick and easy-to-build rubber-band-powered model planes designed by MAKE subscriber Darcy Whyte. There are free, downloadable instructions on the site and info and video on building, flying, and repairing these simple model planes.

Model Airplane Power by Elastic Rubber Band

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In an unusual expression of love for a classic flick, Jason Urban decked out his etching press with glow-in-the-dark tape, all vector-style. ... and here I was thinking Tron-folk read their texts on wireframed Kindles :/ More pics for the viewing over at Printeresting. [via Geekologie]

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Ars Technica gives us a look into the world of "High Frequency Trading" (HFT), a lightspeed quick automated style of stock-market trading that uses semiautonomous systems to buy and sell assets in a fraction of a second, for a fraction of a cent more than they paid, a billion times, and make real money:

Some categories of "predatory algos" closely monitor the markets in order to sniff out exactly these types of hidden large orders, so that the algo can trade against them. For instance, if a predatory algo detects that someone is trying to hide a large sell order for INTC by trickling it out into the market in small blocks, it might work to bid down the price of INTC just a bit so that it can pick up those blocks at a discount and then sell them for a profit when the share price floats back up to the market's earlier, non-manipulated valuation...

The final animal in the HFT menagerie that I'll point out on this brief tour is the automated market maker (AMM), which is a subtype of what is often called "dark pools," or "dark liquidity." AMMs like Citadel always stand ready to buy and sell large quantities of assets, and they don't publish price quotes to other market participants via exchanges.

To find out what assets a dark pool will either sell or buy and at what price, you first have to ping it. Once you ping the pool with a request to, say, buy a specific asset, the pool will reply with the price that it's willing to sell you that asset for. You can either accept the price and complete the transaction, or turn it down and ping again later to see if the price has moved in your direction.

The Matrix, but with money: the world of high-speed trading (via Futurismic)

BuR4N writes with news that 10 US movie companies have filed a suit in Swedish civil court seeking to shut down The Pirate Bay and impose a fine on its three former operators, Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg and Peter Sunde, as well as the site's bandwidth supplier. Speaking to Torrentfreak, Sunde said, "It's another day in the whole soap opera of TPB. They're suing us in Stockholm where none of us live. They're suing us over something which we don't own. I think the most funny part of the whole suit is that they just write: 'Reservella is a company run by Fredrik Neij' — out of 40 pages of paper that's all they have to say, and it's so wrong. They have no paperwork to back it up." Meanwhile, plans for The Pirate Bay to be sold to Global Gaming X seem to have stalled.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Tor.com has just published Daniel H Wilson's debut short story, "The Nostalgist," and it's a lovely, sweet and sad piece of pinnocchiopunk. You probably know Wilson from his immensely popular nonfiction books, How To Survive a Robot Uprising: Tips on Defending Yourself Against the Coming Rebellion and Where's My Jetpack?: A Guide to the Amazing Science Fiction Future that Never Arrived . Daniel's got a PhD in robotics from CMU, and a poet's soul, which is an unbeatable combination.

Liz Gorinsky, Daniel's editor at Tor, adds, "Within the next few days, we'll also be running a video/visual arts/poetry contest that asks our readers to demonstrate why they should be spared by the incoming robot overlord."

He was an old man who lived in a modest gonfab, and over the last eighty hours his Eyes™ and Ears™ had begun to fail. In the first forty hours, he had ignored the increasingly strident sounds of the city of Vanille and focused on teaching the boy who lived with him. But after another forty hours the old man could no longer stand the Doppler-affected murmur of travelers on the slidewalks outside, and the sight of the boy's familiar deformities became overwhelming. It made the boy sad to see the old man's stifled revulsion, so he busied himself by sliding the hanging plastic sheets of the inflatable dwelling into layers that dampened the street noise. The semitransparent veils were stiff with grime and they hung still and useless like furled, ruined sails.

The old man was gnarled and bent, and his tendons were like taut cords beneath the skin of his arms. He wore a soiled white undershirt and his sagging chest bristled with gray hairs. A smooth patch of pink skin occupied a hollow under his left collar bone, marking the place where a rifle slug had passed cleanly through many decades before. He had been a father, an engineer, and a war-fighter, but for many years now he had lived peacefully with the boy.

Everything about the old man was natural and wrinkled except for his Eyes™ and Ears™, thick glasses resting on the creased bridge of his nose and two flesh-colored buds nestled in his ears. They were battered technological artifacts that captured sights and sounds and sanitized every visual and auditory experience. The old man sometimes wondered whether he could bear to live without these artifacts. He did not think so.

"Grandpa," the boy said as he arranged the yellowed plastic curtains. "Today I will visit Vanille City and buy you new Eyes™ and Ears™."

The Nostalgist (Thanks, Liz!)

Just Posted: Our in depth review of the Olympus E-P1. Olympus has generated quite a buzz with its compact, mirrorless Micro Four Thirds camera. Its metal body, styled to evoke memories of the company's successful Pen series of half-frame film cameras contains a 12MP image stabilized sensor mated to the company's latest image processing engine. So, is this 'Digital Pen' the perfect carry everywhere camera? Read our 37-page in-depth review to find out.

Over the past few weeks, the cellphone industry has been criticized on a variety of subjects, from distracted driving to handset exclusivity deals to everything else that's shady within the industry. Verizon's CEO has now responded, addressing what he claims are "myths" about standard practices. Reader DJRumpy points out that the chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition Policy and Consumer Rights has been calling for an investigation into whether competition is being stifled through many of these practices, "including possible text messaging price fixing and questionable roaming arrangements." Apparently the new antitrust chief is hitting resistance from within the government over the aggressive inquiries into this and other major industries. However, a small victory was achieved the other day when the National Telecommunications and Information Administration "told incumbent carriers that they'll have to prove their cases just like everyone else if they want to challenge broadband grant proposals from smaller players." There is also legislation in the works that would require states to impose a ban on text messaging while driving or lose a significant portion of their federal highway funding.

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.

My friend Bill Wasik has a book out now that should appeal to Boing Boing types, And Then There's This: How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture. Several years ago, Wasik started the Mob Project, which launched flash mobs as an insanely popular fad in New York, then globally. We interviewed him in Stay Free! about it a while back.

Wasik's book looks at how ideas spread online through social networks and other media channels. In each chapter, Wasik, who is an editor at Harper's magazine, conducts some sort of prank to explore the ways single messages can evolve and have massive ripple effects. I especially dug his observations on how the internet and mp3 swapping have affected indie rock (since, as a clueless middle-ager, I haven't kept up): with bands and their careers now playing a much smaller role than individual songs and musicians.

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.

Earlier this month, Jason and I guest blogged at Consumerist. Here's something I posted there that might interest you all as well:

Remember when you could buy barbiturates for the baby? Cover your house with asbestos? Or get heroin from the doctor? Okay, probably not, but thanks to the immortal beauty of advertising, you can take a trip back in time. Here's our pick of some of the most ironic ads in American history.

(with apologies to my writing partner, Torchinsky, who loves Corvairs)

Link

Planetone shares plans to build the Morphatron, a big ol' analog vocoder and formidable soldering project -

I designed it from scratch, although I did investigate as many vocoder schematics I could get my hands on. I focused on using easily obtainable components that are inexpensive, and I tried to keep the circuit as simple as possible without sacrificing functionality.

A vocoder basically has two inputs and one output. The first input is the program (usually a connected to a microphone) and the second input receives a carrier signal (usually a keyboard). The program signal is then fed to an analysis section, which extracts the spectral information from the sound and applies it to the carrier signal. This vocoder will analise the signal on 14 bands, but the design can easily be modified to include more channels, or actually fewer (if you are in a hurry).

Though not exactly a beginner's project, much of the assembly involves building multiples of the same board - making the whole seem a bit less daunting. Schematic, steps, and demo available on the project's instructable.

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A month ago, we wrote about a column by Connie Schultz, of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, supposedly talking up a a plan to change copyright law to better protect newspapers from "parasites." This was a dumb plan no matter how you look at it, and Schultz ended up in a battle of words with Jeff Jarvis that kind of derailed the actual discussion on the plan itself. As we noted recently, the brothers behind the plan, David and Daniel Marburger, contacted us (well David did) to let us know that Schultz had totally misrepresented their plan. So we took a look at the full plan, and, indeed, Schultz's column was simply wrong in describing their plan. While we still think the Marburgers' actual plan is misguided, Schultz's write up of it was not at all accurate.

Schultz summarized the Marburgers' plan like this:

• Aggregators would reimburse newspapers for ad revenues associated with their news reports.
• Injunctions would bar aggregators' profiting from newspapers' content for the first 24 hours after stories are posted.

Neither point is actually in the Marburgers' plan (and, it's important to note that the Marburgers are only talking about a very, very narrow range of "aggregators" which I don't even think count as aggregators). They talk about sites like The Daily Beast, which is a competing publication more than an "aggregator." They make it clear that they think real aggregators like Google News are only a good thing. Also, they flat out do not suggest a 24-hour block makes sense:

1. We do not advocate a statutory 24-hour moratorium on rewriting news reports originated by others. Like you, we'd vigorously oppose that.

2. We do not think that linking to originators' news sites, as Google News does, is bad; on balance, we think it's good for any news originator.

So why bring this up again? Well, it seems Schultz can't leave well enough alone, and has to poke "bloggers" again as being some sort of anti-journalists. In her most recent column she talks up how real journalists fact-check and "citizen-journalist" bloggers do not:

The so-called citizen journalism of most blogs is an affront to those of us who believe reporting and attribution must precede publication.

Fact-checking is tedious; it often derails juicy rumor and deflates many a story.

So... um... why is it that she got her facts wrong and it was blogs that published the full story on the Marburgers' plan? Meanwhile, it was her high-minded colleagues at the Cleveland Plain Dealer who brushed off all the criticism of Schultz by declaring: "It's really a bunch of pipsqueaks out there (on the Internets) talking about what the real journalists do."

In the end, we have an original story that Schultz continues to stand behind, despite it being incorrect. You have a number of bloggers who have been digging into the details, and posting thoughtful analyses of the Marburgers' plan -- while the folks at the Plain Dealer brush them off as "pipsqueaks" who don't fact check? Yeah, that's credible...

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: I'm not one of those who thinks there's some sort of war brewing between "mainstream media" and "bloggers." I actually find the whole concept silly. Blogs are simply a publishing platform. Some use them for journalism (including many mainstream media publications). Others don't. Lumping them all together makes no sense. But pretending that old school journalists have some sort of higher ground to stand on just because they work for a publication that prints itself out on paper doesn't make much sense to me.

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Julie188 writes "Mystery solved! Microsoft's latest emergency out-of-band patch was weird beyond belief. A notice was sent to journalists and researchers late Friday evening that the patch was coming Tuesday, but Microsoft refused to explain the flaw and even put a cone of silence around researchers who would have otherwise talked about it. But finally, one researcher broke ranks and explained that the patch was caused by a flaw introduced in Microsoft's own development tools. This flaw was also the source of the emergency ActiveX patch, which took about 18 months to complete and which supposedly fixed the problem by turning off ActiveX (setting a 'killbit' on the control). Researchers at Black Hat on Wednesday will be demonstrating how to override the killbit controls and get access to vulnerabilities supposedly stopped with a killbit. What's really scary is that Microsoft has issued 175 killbits fixes so far."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I got a nice response, both here and on Twitter, to my Lost Knowledge column on wire-wrapping. Folks had memories, both fond and otherwise, of wrapping circuits. In the comments, Tai Oliphant posted a link to his Z80 computer project, which was wire-wrapped (with over 350' of 30-gauge wire!).

Z80 Microcomputer Project

More:
Lost Knowledge: Wire-wrapping
Homemade computer

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Hugh Pickens writes "Andrew Revkin writes in the NY Times that since 1553, when Sir Hugh Willoughby led an expedition north in search of a sea passage over Russia to the Far East, mariners have dreamed of a Northern Sea Route through Russia's Arctic ocean that could cut thousands of miles compared with alternate routes. A voyage between Hamburg and Yokohama is only 6,600 nm. via the Northern Sea Route — less than 60% of the 11,400 nm. Suez route. Now in part because of warming and the retreat and thinning of Arctic sea ice in summer, this northern sea route is becoming a reality with the 12,700-ton 'Beluga Fraternity,' designed for a mix of ice and open seas, poised to make what appears to be the first such trip. The German ship picked up equipment in Ulsan, South Korea, on July 23 and arrived in Vladivostok on the 25th with a final destination at the docks in Novyy Port, a Siberian outpost. After that, if conditions permit, it will head to Antwerp or Rotterdam, marking what company officials say would be the first time a vessel has crossed from Asia to Europe through the Arctic on a commercial passage."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Simon Kirby sends word of a hot new group destined for stardom and driven by solenoids. Ladies & gents, put your hands together for - Cybraphon!

[…] a robotic orchestra in a large display cabinet, inspired by 19th century automata. The unusual feature of Cybraphon is that it is emotional. It's mood is shaped by how popular it is online, as it obsessively googles for itself, tracks it's facebook friends, checks it's myspace page, and updates it's twitter feed 24 hours a day. If it's feeling popular (for example if it finds it's been covered in MAKE), then it will play more upbeat music. However, just like a real band it is addicted to its own celebrity so there will be an inevitable crash in its mood if its fame does not constantly increase.

Give the band an ego boost by checking out the demo track plus plenty of video from the build on the project's blog.

More:

Robot rock group readies for next gig

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Pentax has released a firmware update for its K-7 mid-level DSLR. Version 1.01 adds a new custom function that defines the default behavior of the the four way controller when in manual AF-point-selection mode. The default can be switched between AF point selection and direct access to four key functions. The update also claims to make stability improvements to its general performance.

We've missed our buddy I-Wei Huang, aka Crabfu, who's been busy getting the hang of raising ShrimpFu (aka his adorable baby son). While he hasn't been building any bots (at least that he's showing us), he's been keeping busy between diaper changes with painting on his iPhone. I love that you can see the painting process in these videos. I learned something about layering, shading, and detailing watching these. He's got plenty more on his blog.

Speed Painting videos (iPhone Brushes app)

More:
The New Yorker cover art produced on iPhone

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Maker Bhautik Joshi built this excellent tilt-shift lens using a T-mount adapter, rubber pipe coupling, and a medium format lens found on eBay. It may not be as precise as a conventional tilt-shift lens, but it does produce an excellent image at a fraction of the cost.

[via hackaday]

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Over the past few years, we've talked about ways that musicians and record labels can (and have) adapted to the changing music marketplace, but the case of brick-and-mortar music retailers is an one. The big players: Tower, Wherehouse and Virgin Music have mostly all disappeared. Music sales in big box retailers (Wal-Mart, Best Buy, etc.) remain narrowly focused on top hits and don't get much shelf-space (Best Buy recently announced plans to cut music inventory by half). However, smaller, indie record shops have been learning to adapt. More than five years ago, we wrote about some indie shops recognizing that they needed to become more of a destination, rather than a "record store." And over the years, we've seen more and more and more stories of smaller record stores learning to adapt.

The latest, sent in by Dave W looks at a bunch of shops in the UK that appear to have realized that they need to completely change -- including one that's really focused on being a destination for people to hang out and buy coffee... while hearing music (often live music) and then selling only special physical goods: limited edition box sets and vinyl. And, apparently for some of these shops, business is better than before. Despite the disappearance of regular CD sales, they've more than made it up selling other music-related goods. It's about recognizing that people still do want physical goods, but they view it as a souvenir, to show support for the musicians, rather than buying "the music" itself. The music, to them, is free. But that doesn't mean they won't pay for goods of value. And retailers can absolutely support that new market as well.

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Marilyn sez, ""Around eight months ago, Mark Webber began work on his latest project, which he is very nearly ready to print. It's a typographic map of Paris. It's in French (naturally) and, being a linocut, Webber has had to carve out every single street and area name he's included, in reverse. Oh and it's 1.8 metres across..."

Man seeks massive printer (Thanks, Marilyn!)

Access Copyright, the Canadian author's collecting society (a group that collects money from libraries for book lending and gives it to authors) is using its members' money to sabotage an enormously popular consultation on the future of Canadian copyright.

Previous to this consultation, the Canadian government twice tried to ram through restrictive, US-style copyright rules, refusing to meet with Canadian creators, net-users, libraries, educators, publishers or musicians. Now, after hundreds of thousands of Canadians came forward demanding public consultations and a balanced, made-in-Canada answer to copyright in the information age, Access Copyright has responded with an hysterical, dishonest call to its members to condemn the consultation and any notion of protecting privacy, access, fair dealing and other public rights in copyright.

The broadside includes this remarkable condemnation of "users" of information -- that is, readers, writers, teachers, scholars, fans, government, students -- "It's a simple fact that users outnumber us. But Canadian users involved in the online debate are so adept at leveraging the Internet and social networks to their advantage, there's a danger that your voices as Canadian creators and publishers will be drowned out by the chatter. Your interests need to be expressed as forcefully as possible, and it's up to you to get involved to make that happen."

These are the same people who launched the ill-starred "Captain Copyright" campaign, using writers' money to produce embarrassing, half-witted comic books that were meant to indoctrinate children, inculcating them with fear of using authors' works in their own creations.

After the Captain Copyright fiasco, it seemed that Access Copyright would settle down and look at a balanced approach. But recent times have seen an upswing in loony, toxic copyright maximalism from the organization, including a recent bid to collect money for out-of-copyright public domain materials.

As Michael Geist says, "So AC claims that the public is trying to deprive them of their livelihood, while they actually try to get the public to support their livelihood by charging for things that doesn't even belong in their repertoire. Hard to believe that users are now characterized as powerful and adept at controlling the debate. All the more reason to encourage people to use Speakoutoncopyright.ca and make their voice heard."

As a Canadian author, Access Copyright is supposed to represent my interests in the Canadian copyright debate. Instead, they are setting out to undermine the first glimmer of sanity in Canadian copyright policy in three governments -- and using my money to do it. For shame.

Copyright Debate Takes Aim at Your Livelihood

Last week I banned my dog from using my soldering iron since she used up all my solder. Well, that hasn't stopped her from learning how to program a video game on the XGS AVR 8-Bit Development System. There isn't any soldering required, so I guess it's OK. The only question I have now is, "When do I get a chance to play?"

For the next week, or until supplies run out, both XGS Development systems are 15% off. Pick your favorite flavor, either the AVR 8-Bit system or the 16-Bit PIC, both are yummy!

These kits were designed with the philosophy that you don't want to waste time trying to figure things out. Each kit takes you step by step, saving you time, so you can learn quickly and have fun doing it! They include everything you need to get started right away.

Please Note: Not every dog will be able to program the XGS Development system, but most humans will, even beginners.

More about the XGS AVR 8-Bit Development System and the XGS PIC 16-Bit Development System

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More mask glory from Ukrainian steampunk leatherworker's collective Bob Basset -- a bug-eyed monster.

Mask - order number N. ????? ????? ????? ?

A handsome, welcoming new border crossing has had its 21-foot-high yellow "United States" letters scrapped because crazy border people are afraid that the words "United States" will serve as an irresistible temptation for terrorists.

Four years ago, when the federal General Services Administration unveiled its plans for a new border-crossing station here in northeastern New York State, the design was presented as part of the agency's campaign to raise the dismal standards of government architecture. Even many in the famously fractious architectural community celebrated the complex -- particularly its main building, emblazoned with glossy yellow, 21-foot-high letters spelling "United States" -- as a rare project the government could point to with pride...

Yet three weeks ago, less than a month after the station opened, workers began prying the big yellow letters off the building's facade on orders from Customs and Border Protection. The plan is to dismantle the rest of the sign this week...

"There were security concerns," said Kelly Ivahnenko, a spokeswoman for the customs agency. "The sign could be a huge target and attract undue attention. Anything that would place our officers at risk we need to avoid."

At a Border Crossing, Security Trumps Openness (via Schneier)

A paper in Archives of Disease in Children documents a New Zealand experiment in which children's sleep habits were tracked against their activity, as measured by an actigraph. The conclusion won't surprise many parents: kids who run around all day sleep more at night (and kids who sleep more at night are more apt to run around all day).

The study included 519 healthy 7-year-olds from New Zealand, who each wore a device called an actigraph for 24 hours. An actigraph records movement, providing an objective measure of a child's activity level and sleep time. Parents also noted when their child went to bed, which allowed researchers to calculate how long after bedtime children actually fell asleep.

The researchers found a wide variation in how quickly children fell asleep, with some taking as little as 13 minutes and others needing more than 40 minutes after going to bed. Within this range, there was a close relationship between the onset of sleep and daytime activity. On average, children took an extra three minutes to fall asleep for every hour they weren't moving about. Also, the children who fell asleep faster slept longer overall. On average, children got one extra hour of slumber for every 11-minute drop in how long they took to get to sleep.

Active days mean better bedtimes (via Consumerist)

Earlier in July, I attended the Kansas University Campbell Conference, the annual event at which the Campbell and Sturgeon Awards are given out (Little Brother was one of the Campbell winners this year). One of the honorees at the awards ceremony was Paul Carter, the historian and science fiction scholar. Paul was absolutely charming all weekend, a clever, twinkle-eyed presence in the room at all the various discussions, and then, at the very end of the event, he took the podium and delivered the closing lecture.

Called "The Enormous Absurdity of Nature," Carter's essay was one of the most beautiful, lyrical and thought-provoking pieces of writing I had encoutered; it examined the mythic, religious and scientific history of humanity's relationship to the Earth, to space, and to the moon. It epitomized everything great about scholarly writing -- the ability to show the unexpected connections between seemingly disparate subjects and to illuminate them in so doing.

Paul's son Bruce was kind enough to provide me with a copy of the manuscript for "The Enormous Absurdity of Nature" and to pass on Paul's consent to publish it here. I only regret that there isn't video of Paul's delivery, which was magnificent, practically a sermon (turns out Paul's father was a Methodist minister).

So here it is; posting it here is one of my most exciting Boing Boing moments for the year. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

During the week in the hot summer of 1994 when we celebrated the 25th anniversary of the first human visit to Earth's moon, broken chunks of Comet Shoemaker-Levy, carefully labeled from A to W by watchers on Earth, crashed into the back side of Jupiter. When the big planet rotated sufficiently to show Earth observers the extent of the damage, Jupiter quite to their surprise displayed visible blemishes, some of them more than Earth-sized, on its colorful cloud-banded face. They shared space with the long-extant Great Red Spot, which Jupiter watchers had had under continuous observation for two centuries and more.

Jupiter's diameter is ten times Earth's. A comet hurtling into that roiling gas ball, unless perchance it were to stir up organic processes out of that primal soup, must be less than a pinprick. But a similar solid body smiting the Earth would be quite another case. Conceivably it could send the current lord of creation, homo sapiens, to join his august predecessor the dinosaur.

Dinosaurs, from the innocuous children's purple friend Barney to the frightful raptors portrayed in Jurassic Park and its sequels, have in the modern imagination to a great extent displaced the dragon. What fascinates us about them is precisely that they came, lived, flourished and died without any human referent whatsoever. To one 19th century Victorian clerical gentleman, that utter absence of human context posed a troublesome question for traditional faith: "Who can think that a being of unbounded power, wisdom, and goodness should create a world

The Enormous Absurdity of Nature (PDF, scan of original typescript)

The Enormous Absurdity of Nature (HTML, OCR'ed from original typed manuscript)

(Thanks, Paul and Bruce!)

Kodak has announced three 12 megapixel compact cameras. The Z950 offers 10x image stabilized lens, 3 inch LCD and HD video recording. No indication is given of the range of its Schneider-branded lens, leading us to suspect it has no wide-angle capability. The company has also refreshed its 'M' range, adding the M381 and M341 with 5x and 3x zooms, and 3.0" and 2.7" LCDs, respectively to slot nicely into popular price points. All three cameras have Kodak's Smart Capture scene recognition and exposure system.

Here's my Guardian review of Chris Anderson's excellent new book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price. As with The Long Tail, Free gave me lots to think about: it does a tremendous job of enumerating the economic and business opportunities derived from the net's capacity to deliver so much for free. However, I think that, as with The Long Tail, Free stops short of considering one of the most important aspects of the net: the extent to which purely non-economic, non-commercial activity is filling in niches that were formerly reserved for commercial undertakings, or were altogether invisible.

There's plenty in our world that lives outside of the marketplace: it's a rare family that uses spot-auctions to determine the dinner menu or where to go for holidays. Who gets which chair and desk at your office is more likely to be determined on the lines of "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need" than on the basis of the infallible wisdom of the marketplace. The internally socialistic, externally capitalistic character of most of our institutions tells us that there's something to the idea that markets may not be the solution to all our problems.

And here's where Free starts to trip up. Though Anderson celebrates the best of non-commercial and anti-commercial net-culture, from amateur creativity to Freecycle, he also goes through a series of tortured (and ultimately less than convincing) exercises to put a dollar value on this activity, to explain the monetary worth of Wikipedia, for example.

And there is certainly some portion of this "free" activity that was created in a bid to join the non-free economy: would-be Hollywood auteurs who hope to be discovered on YouTube, for example. There's also plenty of blended free and non-free activity

But for the sizeable fraction of this material - and it is sizeable - that was created with no expectation of joining the monetary economy, with no expectation of winning some future benefit for its author, that was created for joy, or love, or compulsion, or conversation, it is just wrong to say that the "price" of the material is "free".

Chris Anderson's Free adds much to The Long Tail, but falls short

An anonymous reader writes "While spam levels globally remain at a two-year high of approximately 90 percent, some European countries are seeing levels of over 95%. According to a new MessageLabs report (PDF here), countries such as Germany, France and the Netherlands are being heavily targeted by spammers with automated spam translation techniques. The use of automated translation services enables multiple-language spam runs and is responsible for a 13% increase in spam levels in these countries since May."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Here's a hastily-uploaded set of video stills from the Boing Boing Video shoot of The Mighty Boosh (Noel Fielding, Julian Barratt, Dave Brown, Michael Fielding, and Rich Fulcher) performing live at the Roxy on Sunset tonight. We'll be publishing a little mini-documentary about the Boosh's voyage to Hollywood next week, but I thought these quick snaps would be fun to share now. The show was a lot of fun, and all those trufans lined up for blocks, many in character costumes? Pretty amazing to witness. Related, from earlier today: Boing Boing Video shoot notes: The Mighty Boosh

This is a fun little amp that is easy to solder and was designed to fit into almost any box. I stuffed mine into the same box that was used for shipping it to my house! Solder it up, pick a box, and plug it in!

More about the Box amplifier kit

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Considering that the entire point of the Associated Press is to explain the news to people, is there anything more damning than the fact that most people still have absolutely no idea what its DRM for news system is actually about. The company has given different interviews, indicating very different things. My read on it, from these different interviews, is that the AP is basically going to track stories and sue people they feel abuse some mythological standard that the AP feels should be a part of copyright law. But, that's not entirely clear.

Danny Sullivan has plenty of questions as well, but when he reached the AP, he was told that the organization is "done" talking about these issues. Yup. The organization that's supposed to make the news clear can't make its own news clear to just about anyone... and when confronted on it, says "we're done" and hangs up the phone. That's not the action of a company with a plan. That's the action taken by an organization in turmoil, grasping at straws, that had a weak plan that never made much sense in the first place, and doesn't know how to respond to being called on it.

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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 his partner Sally, five animals, too many old cars, and a shed full of crap.

I'm more used to being a critic of advertising, but I have to admit, I kind of like this old late 60s-early 70s ad campaign/stunt for Canadian Club whiskey. The idea is really simple: the company hid cases of the whiskey in remote locations throughout the world, and daring go-getter boozehounds with, I imagine, a good bit of disposable income, would go off in hunt of them. The ad I have here describes one at the bottom of Devil's Backbone Reef in the Bahamas. Here's an old article about it, too.

Incredibly, as improbable as it would seem that a company would be allowed to just leave around cases of alcohol in our modern, fussier time, it looks like the contest was revived, in 2004, but they were in U-Hauls, which makes it lots less fun.

Information about the event is a bit scant online, but I did find this one very, very informative comment:

In 1967, Hiram Walker and its advertising agency began hiding cases of Canadian Club Whiskey around the world. In all, 22 cases were hidden and 5 remain hidden to this day. The 5 remaining cases were hidden: 1) At the North Pole; 2) In Lake Placid, NY; 3) In The Yukon Territory of Canada; 4) On Robinson Crusoe Island off the coast of Chile; and 5) In Ujiji. Of the 5 remaining cases, those in Lake Placid, The Yukon, and Chile have clues which are at best vague. Those cases will most likely never be found. Of the 2 other cases, both the North Pole clues and the Ujiji clues were quite specific. The North Pole clues included Longitude and Latitude, Minutes and Seconds. Unfortunately, due to its location, it most likely sank into the snow long ago. The Ujiji case remains the strongest candidate as to its potential discovery. If anyone is interested in learning of the Ujiji hidden case of Canadian Club whiskey, contact me @ james.willhoft@gte.net

Wow! There's still 5 cases out there! I actually found a few other similar posts about the remaining 5 cases, signed by a "James W." Man, this guy really, really wants those weathered old cases of hooch. Maybe it's time to get up an expedition of discriminating drunks with lots of frequent flyer miles to burn, or willing to take up a collection and get poor, obsessed James a case of his own.

icebike writes "In our recent discussion of the phenomenon of noctilucent clouds, there was some suggestions that these might be the product of global warming due to moisture being lofted high into the atmosphere. It now appears that these clouds are simply the product of Shuttle launches. In a story about the Tunguska blast, Science News says: 'Each launch of a space shuttle, which burns a combination of liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen as fuel, pumps about 300 metric tons of water vapor into the atmosphere at altitudes between 100 and 115 kilometers. Soon after the January 16, 2003, launch of the shuttle Columbia, a liftoff that took place just after the height of summer in the Southern Hemisphere, noctilucent clouds appeared over Antarctica. Similarly, a widespread display of the night-shining clouds showed up over Alaska two days after the shuttle Endeavour blasted off on August 8, 2007. Previous studies show that in both instances those clouds included material from the shuttle plumes.' So, man-made after all?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

JohnForDummies alerts us to a suggestion from Dan Lyons over at Newsweek, saying that sites like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube should just start charging for their basic service. He brushes off those who think it's a bad idea as "the prevailing wisdom in Silicon Valley today is that everything on the Internet must be free." Except, that's not true. No one (NO ONE) is saying "everything on the internet must be free." This is just a silly strawman put forth by folks with little understanding of the business models people are actually discussing. Lyons also fails in recognizing that his "example" isn't even a very good one. He talks about PalTalk, who has built a business by offering premium features at a fee. That's the typical "freemium" model, but that's not what he then suggests for Facebook and Twitter, who he says should just start charging. Amazingly, he suggests that Facebook would only lose 50% of its users if it started charging (in fact, he seems to suggest that this is a conservative estimate: "Even if half of Facebook's members were to leave rather than pay...")

Well, there's a problem with both Lyons' math and his crystal ball. In cases where companies have gone from free to charging, the numbers I've seen (and, yes, it does range slightly, depending on the service) the rate of uptake is usually somewhere between 0 and 1% at best. Even if we grant Facebook some credit as being a "necessity" for students, I'd be shocked if they could get 5% of people to pay up to use the service -- and they'd find that number dwindle really fast. With only 5% of people using the service, it certainly becomes a lot less useful. Rather than communicating with all your friends, you can now only communicate with the 5% who ponied up. Or, you jump ship to someone else that doesn't charge.

And that's the real issue. The second that Facebook even hinted at charging users for basic service is the second users would start moving en masse to another (very, very happy competitors would be quick to offer themselves as an alternative). I recognize that it was still back in the days when Dan Lyons hated social media and thought social networking and blogs were evil, but he might want to familiarize himself with the history of Friendster. For a while, there were all sorts of rumors that Friendster was about to start charging, and MySpace kicked off a very well coordinated "grassroots" rumor campaign about how Friendster was about to charge, and everyone should switch to MySpace before Friendster put up a paywall.

In other words, not only will a lot less than 50% of people sign up for a pure fee-based Facebook, but everyone will move elsewhere, making that the place to be (for free). That's not to say that Facebook couldn't come up with some additional offerings of value that it could charge for, but the idea of charging for the basic service is really short-sighted and easily debunked if you think through it.

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Another great soft circuit tutorial by Hannah Perner-Wilson:

Pressure sensors on your fingertips intended for use by children and their piano teachers to visualize the difference between "p" piano (soft) and "f" forte (hard). The pressure sensitive layers of fabric in the fingertips of these gloves are stretchy so that they can fit tightly.

The sensors are made from stretch conductive fabric and piezoresistive Eeonyx fabric. The glove is connected to the Arduino via metal snaps and a fabric cable made from sewn conductive thread traces.

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Time lapse video of Michelle Wibowo's making a baby cake.... via cwiggins.

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e9th writes "We know that Microsoft failed last February in its attempt to buy Yahoo. Now, Advertising Age reports that they've reached a deal. Instead of a buyout, the two will enter into a revenue sharing agreement, and Bing will become Yahoo's default search engine. The meat of the AdAge article can be found in Yahoo News. This deal may give Google something to worry about."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Eric Goldman points us to the news that Hotels.com has had the trademark application on its own name rejected (warning: pdf) as being too generic. I have to admit I'm really, really surprised about this. I would think that the combination of "hotels" with a ".com" on the end switches it from being generic to distinct, since there's only one hotels.com. However, the trademark board and the court note that there are lots of other sites that use a combination of hotels and .com, such as www.all-hotels.com, www.web-hotels.com, www.my-discount-hotels.com. That could be true, but I think those are all different enough themselves from the straight hotels.com that even getting a trademark on hotels.com alone shouldn't prohibit those other sites from existing. But that's not what the court found, noting that hotels.com itself was perfectly generic and unprotectable by trademark. It's not clear how much this would actually matter, since anyone else using the phrase will ultimately end up helping to advertise hotels.com itself. However, it does raise significant questions about trademarks on other generic words plus a .com at the end.

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Dave and Dave from Hack Junk decided, sort of at the last minute, to enter the recent Seattle Power Tool Race and Derby. The video documents their build and their two race attempts.

Hack Junk

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(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.)

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More @BBVBOX: boingboingvideo.com

Icemaann writes "ISC is reporting that a new, remotely exploitable vulnerability has been found in all version of BIND 9. A specially crafted dynamic update packet will make BIND die with an assertion error. There is an exploit in the wild and there are no access control workarounds. RedHat claims that the exploit does not affect BIND servers that do not allow dynamic updates, but the ISC post refutes that. This is a high-priority vulnerability and DNS operators will want to upgrade BIND to the latest patch level."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

At the beginning of July, we questioned whether or not the announced purchase of The Pirate Bay by GGF was ever really going to happen. From the statements made by GGF CEO Hans Pandeya, it really seemed quite doubtful. Not only did he do a terrible job of explaining the plan, he contradicted himself multiple times and suggested a few times that the deal could fall through. That may in fact be happening. Two weeks ago, we noted that Pandeya had supposedly hired Wayne Rosso (former Grokster boss) to negotiate with record labels concerning a business model that didn't make much sense to us. Rosso has now admitted that he's no longer working with GGF and doesn't believe the company has the money to make the purchase, and has problems with Pandeya's credibility. So, once again, we're left wondering if this deal will ever happen.

Separately, it should come as little surprise that a bunch of entertainment companies are demanding that the Swedish courts shut The Pirate Bay down. It was noteworthy that in the original ruling against the four people associated with The Pirate Bay, the court did not issue any sort of injunction to stop the site from functioning. The folks at The Pirate Bay are claiming this sudden demand for a shut down is because the entertainment industry is trying to mess with the sale to GGF, but it certainly looks like that's falling apart on its own (as if there was ever any real meat there). Still, for all of the complaining by the entertainment companies, it seems quite premature to shut down the site when the original ruling is still under appeal. But, since when has that ever stopped the industry? In the meantime, it might not matter much even if it is shut down. Since the announcement of the GGF plan, lots of others have stepped up to try to take the place of The Pirate Bay as a key source for torrent searches. It makes you wonder who the entertainment industry will single out next? After all, The Pirate Bay was a relatively small player itself before the US entertainment interests first called it out...

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Cremation Solutions sells "personal urns" that look like the person whose ashes they hold.

Now we can create a custom urn in the image of your loved one or favorite Celebrity.

New advances in facial reconstruction and 3D printing have made it possible to have an urn made in the image of anyone from just a photograph.

Never forget a face. Personal Urns combine art and technology to create a family heirloom that will be cherished for generations.

Available in Two Sizes

• Full sized will hold all of the ashes of any adult

• Keepsake size is about 1/4 of the full sized and will hold about 25 cubic inches

Personal urns (Via Cynical-C)

I'm spending the week in NY with family.

Doing a rssCloud road show on Thurs and meeting with tech industry people on Thurs and Friday.

Yesterday Jay and I did Rebooting the News #18, show notes, MP3. Subscribe to the feed. Every week it's better than the last.

People keep asking for info on programming in the OPML Editor environment. I put together a list of resources. If you know of others please add a comment.

Went to the Mets game yesterday as the guest of Alan Levy of BlogTalkRadio, with my mom and Jesse Stay. I'd say it was the best Mets game I've ever been to. Fantastic come-from-behind victory where the deciding runs were scored with a pinch-hit grand slam. Alan really is up on the Mets so we understood all the strategy behind the Mets moves. Fantastic game. (Right up there with the exciting 16-run World Series blowout by the SF GIants of the Angels in 2002, which I went to with Scoble and Jake Savin.)

Saw this great sign on a walk today: Queens for Mike.

A quick set of snaps from today's Boing Boing Video shoot in Hollywood with Julian Barratt and Noel Fielding of The Mighty Boosh.

We'll be bringing you the video interview soon, and it includes a spontaneous and very special Boing Boing crimp, courtesy of Messrs. Fielding and Barratt. But it was so much fun, I had to share the personal snaps now.

Our crew for this shoot: the lovely Tara McGinley (above, with me and los del Boosh), the inimitable Richard Metzger, Eric Mittleman, Señor Ehrich Blackhound, and Mr. David "Simpsons" Silverman.

Barratt and Fielding are visiting the US to promote the release of all three seasons of their hit BBC show on DVD (their show is also on Adult Swim now, in the asscrack timeslot of 1am on Sundays, which really ought to be corrected). They're playing an intimate gig tonight for some 500 fans at the Roxy on the Sunset Strip in Hollywood. They are huge huge huge in the UK, and as a friend also said, I hope they find the audience they deserve here in the states. That seems inevitable, though, and well under way.

As I began this blog post, I started typing "I am their biggest fan in the world," but that's demonstrably not true. Let us say this: I am their biggest fan among the subset of fans who are not willing to dress up as Tony Harrison, don Bollo drag, or perform amateur crimping in public. Among the fans who will not attempt these things, yes, I am surely the most ardent.

At left, from the shoot -- as Metzger put it: "Noel Fielding's reenactment of Joe Jackson's 'Look Sharp! ' album cover."

Boing Boing Video snaps: The Mighty Boosh (@ Flickr, mostly shot by Tara, special thanks to S. Weiner, A. Carlson, and @MightyBooshDVD.)

You really ought to buy the DVDs. Just trust me on this one:
* The Mighty Boosh: The Complete Season 1
* The Mighty Boosh: Season 2
* The Mighty Boosh: Season 3

You may recall that Blackboard, an e-learning company, got itself a patent a while back that seemed to cover pretty much all e-learning -- and then went about suing others. After a lot of controversy, the company agreed not to sue open source e-learning companies, but everyone else was fair game. The only problem? The patent was almost certainly ridiculous, and numerous thorough breakdowns of the patent raised serious questions about how it ever was approved in the first place. But, of course, the process of invalidating a patent is notoriously slow, and a company can cause lots of trouble in the meantime. In Blackboard's case, it went after competitor Desire2Learn.

Even as the Patent Office realized it needed to rethink the patent, the lawsuit moved forward, with Blackboard scoring a win. Of course, just weeks later, the USPTO gave an initial rejection of the patent. The original court ruling was (of course) appealed (separate from the USPTO ruling), and the good news is that the appeals court has dumped the entire patent. Only took a few years and millions of dollars wasted in legal fees for Desire2Learn. Too bad such money couldn't have gone towards actually improving e-learning. In the meantime, why doesn't anyone ask how such a patent got approved in the first place?

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itwbennett writes "'To be honest, we had no evidence that Oracle wouldn't support JRuby, but we also didn't have any evidence that they would,' said Charles Nutter, explaining why Sun's entire 3-member JRuby team will be leaving the company to work for application hosting company Engine Yard. Nutter called getting hired by Sun about two-and-a-half years ago and being given the chance to work full time on JRuby a 'dream come true.' And said that the decision to leave Sun came down to making sure 'JRuby will get to the next level.'"

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 his partner Sally, five animals, too many old cars, and a shed full of crap.

I've always been fond of VW Beetles, and any real Beetle lover should set aside a special place in their gas-fume-smelling heart for one particular Beetle, the Black Widow. The Black Widow started life as a 1955 oval-window Beetle, boasting a small stable of 36 horses for power. Then, the kooks over at Turbonique, makers of some truly bonkers small jet engines for daredevils and other fun-loving loons, put one of their engines in the Bug, along with the VW/jet engine transaxle they developed. The result was a Beetle that made about 850+hp and weighed about, oh, half of a modern Honda Civic.

The Black Widow was an absurdly fast car; and by the nature of the rocket-type engine used, it had no warm up at all-- one button push and you had full thrust, making it a real hit to drag-racing crowds. In one especially notable race, the Black Widow put Tommy Ivo's Showboat-- a similarly insane dragster with 4 Buick V8 engines-- over its rounded fenders and spanked it, but good; those are pictures of the race shown to the right here.

Like anything truly insane, the Black Widow's life was fast, wild, and short. Apparently, the stock 1955 Beetle's shape is only aerodynamically sound up to about 183 mph-- only about 110 or so mph more than the stock engine could ever push the car-- at which point it, full of false confidence, takes flight. Which the Black Widow did, but even then the fast little bug was put to good use, in this ad.

Upon rereading that ad, I realized that the Black Widow's driver, Roy Drew, must also have a great story. I mean, he's a drag racer with the nickname "Mr.Pitiful." It just doesn't get any better than that.