snitch writes with this snippet from InfoQ about the current state of Google Wave: "With the Google Wave Preview scheduled for public availability on September 30th, Wave API Tech Lead Douwe Osinga has posted on the Wave Google Group about what the team has been working on along with some future directions.Up until now with the limited availability of testing accounts there have been complaints on the Google Group from users that wanted to get their hands on this new technology but didn't have access to the sandbox. As Douwe explains the team has been busy all this time with stability issues and more."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Marple200 writes-

I've wanted to build a custom bicycle for many years. I started wondering how fat of a tire I could accommodate on a bicycle. I had seen pictures of the Hanebrink Technologies extreme terrain bicycle, but wanted something still more extreme. The problem I considered was one of drive train alignment. With the fat tire, the chain had to shift too far outside of the normal bottom bracket to rear wheel alignment, in order to clear the tire width. I also wanted to make this work with gears, as I new the large tire would weigh a lot. Originally I wanted to spoke up a fat tire rim with a standard bicycle hub, but this proved impossible due the the small rim size with the large tire.

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Bicycles | Digg this!

CWmike writes "Microsoft can likely use an 'easy technical work-around' to sidestep a recent injunction by a Texas federal judge that bars the company from selling Word, a patent attorney said today. 'The injunction doesn't apply to existing product that has already been sold,' said Barry Negrin, a partner with the New York firm Pryor Cashman LLP who has practiced patent and trademark law for 17 years. 'Headlines that say Microsoft can't sell Word are not really true,' said Negrin, pointing out that the injunction granted by US District Court Judge Leonard Davis on Tuesday only prohibits Microsoft from selling Word as it exists now after Oct. 10. 'All Microsoft has to do is disable the custom XML feature, which should be pretty easy to do, then give that a different SKU number from what's been sold so it's easy to distinguish the two versions.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The tech industry keeps wanting to think that netbooks are a mistake, but they are not.

Here's a CNET article about a $299 laptop being sold by Walmart and BestBuy. They're cheap, big and run Vista.

I'll go over the specs in a minute, but first a story.

I just took a trip to New York with my new 13.3-inch MacBook Pro, which is a lovely computer. But the next trip I took, a two-day trip up north, I brought my Asus 10-inch and was much happier because: 1. Much longer battery life. 2. A lot lighter and smaller.

The Mac doesn't even have a replaceable battery. The Asus does. When I travel with it I bring an extra 6-cell, and it's still much lighter than the Mac, and it goes for 12 hours without plugging in. That's a huge important difference.

And the smaller size meant I could make the trip with just one bag instead of two.

People who think there is no reason to get a netbook simply don't have one, I conclude. That's fine for ordinary people, but if you make your living as a tech analyst, that's just plain irresponsible.

Now to the specs.

2.2GHz Intel Celeron processor 900, 2GB of memory, DVD-RW/CD-RW drive, 15.4-inch screen, 160GB Serial ATA hard drive (5400 rpm), 802.11b/g wireless, 10/100 Ethernet LAN, Intel's Graphics Media Accelerator 4500MHD, and Microsoft Windows Vista Home Basic Edition operating system.

It's all good till you get to the wireless. I like 802.11n. Much faster. And the OS -- sorry -- I don't do Vista. I have a funny feeling that Microsoft is behind all of this. For some reason they can't handle the idea that people still want their 10-year-old OS. All the R&D that went into Vista, well that's Microsoft's problem, not the users'.

They don't say how much it weighs or how long the battery lasts. Heh. I bet it weighs a lot, and I bet the battery doesn't last very long. Is the battery removable?

In any case, I'm not surprised the $299 "craptop" sells. But -- I'd also be surprised if they do anything to slow down sales of netbooks. They're in a different class. And it's valid. Get used to it, netbooks here to stay folks. And the big, heavy, Vista class? Well they're probably here to stay too. (And I still love my Macs, and wish they'd make one that was really in the netbook class.)

Jennifer Abel of Tara Books send me a PDF version of Fingerprint, by Andrea Anastasio.

When designer and artist Andrea Anastasio visited the US some years ago, he was fingerprinted (like everyone else) by the airport immigration authorities. This moment -- both banal and ominous -- stayed with him until it worked its way into his art. The result is Fingerprint, a playful and provoking tale that celebrates resistance to state surveillance and control. The artist's fingerprints, letter-pressed onto the pages of a book, create progressively complex patterns and sequences, transporting the fingerprint from the world of forensics and law into the freeing world of art and imagination.

This is a timely and many-layered visual tale that is both a work of art and a political communiqué. An accompanying essay by historian and political activist V. Geetha points to those suggestive instances when people across cultures and nations have resisted fingerprinting, asserting their right to existence while fighting all attempts to foreclose their identities. And each copy is an original letterpressed handmade edition - thereby preserving the originality of both the fingerprints and printing method itself.

Fingerprint, by Andrea Anastasio

This would be a fun way to make a snack for your next picnic or party. I'm always forgetting to make something to bring to a friend's house, and would love to be able to just load this up and head out! I might try mounting it over the back wheel though, it seems like it might be more stable there.

Some tasty ice cream recipes you could try: Oatmeal Stout and Heath Bar and Salted Butter Caramel.

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Bicycles | Digg this!

Had a lot of fun with the Scobles today.

At one point I said to the elder Scoble, you know people's last names seem to mean something. He smiled. I said I know I have a funny last name. Like the Boy Named Sue, my father should have sat me down as a boy and said "Son, with that name, you don't get to complain."

It was nice going to Germany where my last name means, roughly, "Person from Vienna."

I enjoyed calling room service, ordering Wiener Schnitzel and really hamming it up and no one seemed to notice or think it was strange. When the waiter brought the food he pronounced it the same way.

An anonymous reader writes "Four days ago, deputies from the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office in Arizona conducted a raid against the county government building hosting computers for a law enforcement database. After threatening to arrest county employees who would stop them, the officers proceeded to secure the room and promptly changed passwords on many of the servers. In a hearing on Friday, a Superior Court judge threatened to hold members of the Sheriff's Office in contempt if they did not reveal the passwords by next Wednesday. Following this, the Sheriff's Office claimed to be conducting an investigation against other Superior Court judges. Courts have asked for passwords before, but never under conditions like this."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Xtools are a fine-looking line of marine tools; as the ISDA blog says, "The rust-resistant tools feature tungsten-carbide cutting blades (for cutting braided wire) and foamy, soft-grip ergonomic handles that float. The loud colors help you find the suckers if you knock them off the boat as you reach for your beverage."

Xtools (via IDSA Materials and Process Selection)

Al writes "A woman with a rare, inherited form of blindness is now able to read, thanks to a gene therapy that caused a new fovea — the part of the retina that is most densely populated with photoreceptors — to grow in her eye. The patient suffers from Leber congenital amaurosis, meaning an abnormal protein makes her photoreceptors have a severely impaired sensitivity to light. SAhe received the experimental treatment twelve months ago when physicians injected a gene encoding a functional copy of the protein into a small part of one eye — about eight-to-nine millimeters in diameter. Along with two other patients receiving the same treatment, her eyesight improved after just a few weeks. Now the physicians report that this patient seems to have developed a new fovea, exactly where she received the injection. Because the woman has been effectively blind since birth, the results suggest that the brain is able to adapt to new visual stimuli remarkably quickly."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

From the picture quality, this looks like an oldie but a goodie. This full scale car replica was made with almost a million matchsticks. Crazy!

More:

• Matchstick art
  
• MatchstickMan - The incredible Matchstick Uke
  
• Sydney Harbour Bridge made of matchsticks
  
• Eiffel tower made of matches
  

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Arts | Digg this!

MAKE subscriber Michael Beck is looking to start up a maker/hacker group in the Salt Lake City, Utah area -

I am interested in gathering a group of makers to share and inspire the Make spirit here in Salt Lake City. Plans to start are to meet regularly and if things go good create a Maker/Hacker space. If interested, please contact me.

Any takers? Drop Michael a line here.

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Announcements | Digg this!

Dan Lorenc writes "Using the StackOverflow.com data dump, I measured the activity of various programming languages throughout the week. The results: Ruby and Python saw a rise in questions asked on the weekend while C# and Java saw a dropoff in activity on the weekend. This means that more programmers are using Python and Ruby on the weekend for their personal projects, showing that these languages are more fun to use. Show this experiment to your boss the next time you are selecting a programming language for a project at work."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The beta-beta release of the Twitter Subscriptions List app for your desktop. Full source included.

Next thing up on my release plate, a version of River2 that fully supports rssCloud.

Lifehacker: Backup and Search Your Friends' Tweets with Google Reader

Educer: "Google Reader is almost a full fledged Twitter client."

Twitter clients -- time to start thinking about two-way RSS support.

Two-way RSS support in Twitter clients means they read real-time RSS feeds, and they generate them. A backup against Twitter's failure.

Hanging out with the Scobles in Half Boon May.

The Big Scoble said "Hey Foo Camp must be coming up soon." I said that would be a good time for the California rssCloud meetup,

Here's the beta-beta release of the Twitter Subscriptions List app for your desktop. Full source included.

Lifehacker: Backup and Search Your Friends' Tweets with Google Reader

Educer: "Google Reader is almost a full fledged Twitter client -- already."

Twitter clients -- time to start thinking about two-way RSS support.

Two-way RSS support in Twitter clients means they read real-time RSS feeds, and they generate them. A backup against Twitter's failure.

Wondering what to do with that snake farm under your desk? Check out this rain gutter solution. Nice and neat. Via Kat on Twitter.

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in DIY Projects | Digg this!

Hugh Pickens writes "The NY Times reports that statisticians from the University of Vermont are hoping to harness the stream of messages flowing through twitter to read public opinion and sentiment in real time. '"Twitter is a reflection of what people are interested in right now," says Peter Dodds, adding that the goal is to establish an index, akin to the Dow Jones industrial average, that can "give an overall sense of how a collective body of people are feeling at any given point in time.' Dodds says he and his colleagues are analyzing about 1,000 tweets each minute, or about a million a day, looking for trends in descriptive words and phrases that indicate moods and emotions. In addition, the two can monitor the public reaction to news or policy announcement and track it over time. The tool is still in its early stages, but eventually Dodds hopes that it could work similarly to Google Flu Trends, a Web tool that doubles as an early-warning system for flu outbreaks by detecting spikes in certain search terms. Since relationships and conversations are so intrinsic to how people communicate on Twitter, the researchers hope that observing how one user's mood is affected by another might shed some light on crowd behavior and emotional contagion. 'All of this data serves as a remote sensor of well-being,' Dodds says."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Death Metal points out a CNet report saying that the Justice Department has come out in favor of the $1.92 million verdict awarded to the RIAA in the Jammie Thomas-Rasset case. Their support came in the form of a legal brief filed on Friday, which notes, "Congress took into account the need to deter the millions of users of new media from infringing copyrights in an environment where many violators believe that they will go unnoticed." It also says, "The Copyright Act's statutory damages provision serves both to compensate and deter. Congress established a scheme to allow copyright holders to elect to receive statutory damages for copyright infringement instead of actual damages and profits because of the difficulty of calculating and proving actual damages."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

marcog123 writes "The International Olympiad in Informatics was held earlier this week in Bulgaria. The IOI is a programming competition for high school learners up to 20 years of age that has a focus on problem solving and algorithms. It was won by 14-year-old Henadzi Karatkevich of Belarus (PDF, list of gold medalists), beating the world's top high school programmers, including 18- and 19-year-olds, to become the youngest winner in the IOI's 21-year history. Competition is really tough, with some countries taking months off school to concentrate only on IOI training. Henadzi first entered the IOI in 2006 when he was only 11 years old and won silver (missing gold by only six points). He won gold in 2007 and 2008. He has the opportunity to enter for the next three years; that is, unless he follows the path of Terence Tao, who won IMO gold at 12 and then went to university the following year. If he continues his current streak, he will easily surpass the current record of six IOI medals by South Africa's Bruce Merry."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apparently this CNC machine can be made in about 30 hours for approximately $100. It's powered by an Arduino which interprets the code sent to it via Python. The Arduino then sends the data to the custom motor controllers that are based on the ATtiny 2313 and l298.

This is the second version of a homemade CNC machine build using mostly off the shelve parts. The first one aka "The beast" had a lot of precision issues due to play in most parts which in turn was caused by mostly bad cutting. Also one of the biggest problems was that when I have build it I did not think to allow later adjustments to be done. So this time almost every part of it allows for some adjustments. It is also easier to build due to the different design.

More about the Valkyrie: $100 Arduino based CNC

In the Maker Shed:


Make: Arduino

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Arduino | Digg this!

Steam Boat Willy has an amazingly detailed account of the technical details on this human powered hovercraft.

Via MITers

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Transportation | Digg this!

fructose writes "The Airborne Laser managed to acquire, track, and illuminate a test missile a few days ago. According to the press release, the Boeing plane 'used its infrared sensors to find a target missile launched from San Nicolas Island, Calif ... issued engagement and target location instructions to the beam control/fire control system ... fired its two solid-state illuminator lasers to track the target and ... fired a surrogate high-energy laser at the target, simulating a missile intercept.' The sensors on board the missile confirmed the 'hit.' Michael Rinn, ABL's program director, said, 'Pointing and focusing a laser beam on a target that is rocketing skyward at thousands of miles per hour is no easy task, but the Airborne Laser is uniquely able to do the job.' The next steps will be to test the high-power laser at full strength in flight and do a complete system test later this year. Its success or failure will determine whether the project gets canceled. Looks like the Real Genius fans out there are finally living the dream."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Mark Dery is guest blogger du jour until August 17. He is the author of Culture Jamming, Flame Wars, Escape Velocity, and The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium. He's at work on The Pathological Sublime, a philosophical investigation into the paradox of horrible beauty and the politics of "just looking."

"Why have we not developed an aesthetic of the inside of the body?," wonders one of the twin gynecologists in David Cronenberg's Dead Ringers. He speaks for Cronenberg, who took up the thread in an interview he and I conducted. "We have contests in which we decide who is the most beautiful woman in the world," said Cronenberg, "and yet, if you were to show the inside of that woman's body, you would have a lot of grossed-out people. Why is that? We should be able to have a World's Most Perfect Kidney contest, where women or men unzip to show their kidneys. We can't become integral creatures until we come to terms with our bodies and we haven't come remotely close to that. We're incredibly schizophrenic."

Cronenberg's visceral aesthetic is bodied forth (so to speak) in La Specola, an 18th century anatomical museum at the University of Florence. It's fitting that the name, from the Latin for mirror (the museum is housed in a former observatory), is close etymological kin to speculum, an instrument used, as every woman knows, to dilate the opening of a body cavity for examination. La Specola is home to a collection of visible women and men, medical teaching aids that comprise some of the finest examples of ceroplasty, the art of modeling anatomical specimens in wax.

La Specola's waxworks are wondrous strange, indeed---a pathological beauty pageant worthy of Cronenberg's wildest dreams. "Le Grazie Smontate,"the "Dissected Graces" of the master modeler Clemente Susini (1754-1814), is a trio of recumbent young women, their tresses spilling over their shoulders, their shapely legs gracefully arranged, the fat, yellow sausages of their intestines coiled neatly on their disemboweled torsos. Gazing languorously up at the viewer, one grace toys girlishly with a braid, her modesty intact despite her bared entrails. Another sloe-eyed beauty flaunts a pert rosebud of a nipple, seemingly unperturbed by the fact that her breast hangs from a flap of flesh peeled back to expose her heart. The hard nipples; the bent leg partly covering (or coyly revealing?) the downy pubes; the head thrown back, lips slightly parted, in an attitude that hovers unsettlingly between post-orgasmic languor and the marionette floppiness of the corpse: these images tap a subterranean river in the erotic imagination. Behind the curtain of scientific progress and public edification drawn across La Specola lurks the shadow of a more than clinical interest in such things.

In A Traffic of Dead Bodies: Anatomy and Embodied Social Identity in 19th-Century America, Michael Sappol argues that the popular anatomical museums of the 19th century---that is, those museums open to the general (male) public, as opposed to those for medical professionals only---cannily exploited this pornographic subtext even as they veiled it in moral sanctimony. "[B]eginning in the 1830s and intensifying in succeeding decades, there arose a variety of anatomical entrepreneurs, eager to cultivate, exploit, and cater to the audience for anatomy through anatomical museums and exhibits,"writes Sappol. "And from the outset...anatomy was assimilated to the purposes of satisfying and profiting from the demand for sexual material, to its critics pornography."

Hillel Schwartz has his finger on the source of the Venus's bizarre charms when he writes, "The female anatomical figure with removable parts...was truly a pedagogical tool, but in wax it also suggested malleability, voluptuousness, and morbidezza: delicate flesh." There's a voluptuous luster to her beeswax-and-animal fat flesh that makes her uncannily lifelike, more so after two centuries than modern waxworks made of synthetic paraffins or the latex-skinned grotesques in theme-park robot dramas. Unlike an actual cadaver, whose waxy pallor makes it look as lifeless as a mannequin, the Dissected Venus seems almost to glow, if not with life, with a robust undeath.

Of course, any poetic reveries about the sex appeal of Dissected Venuses must take account of the extent to which these wax women hold a mirror up to culture rather than the nature---specifically, the Enlightenment culture into which they were born, when scientists were busy weaving myths about gender and the "natural order" that denied women the democratic promise of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen (1789) and redefined them as weaker vessels, consecrated to procreation and (male) recreation. The anatomical models of the day dramatized this reduction of woman to womb.

But, all that said, the creepy seductions of eviscerated wax women can't be neatly disposed of as a misogynist's guilty pleasure. There's more to La Specola's anatomical models than meets the male gaze. They were essential aids to medical pedagogy and obscure objects of desire, disseminating life-saving knowledge about female anatomy even as they reaffirmed the primacy of women's sexual and maternal functions. Now, more than two hundred years after their birth, the anatomical Venuses still taunt us. The morbid fantasies they inspire are reviled by feminist critics and relished by aesthetic transgressors in the Bataillean mode.

Walking from vitrine to vitrine, in La Specola, I'm mesmerized by the visceral charms of these obstetric Ophelias, floating through the centuries on suggestively rumpled sheets. I can't tear my eyes away from the hallucinogenically vivid colors of their coiled intestines, no less lovingly modeled than their unmistakably Florentine faces. Their sheets are brittle, fraying to ribbons, but they seem not to have aged a day since they were first unveiled to the public eye in 1780. Analyzing the welter of conflicting reactions, philosophical and psychological, that they inspire, I recognize these Aphrodites of the Operating Theater as disquiet muses of the Pathological Sublime---sisters of the nude sleepwalkers in Paul Delvaux's surrealist nocturnes, or of the naked victim in Duchamp's creepy, Hitchcockian last work, a museum-style diorama of a sex murder called Étant donnés. I think of the Victorian critic Walter Pater's famous meditation on the Mona Lisa:

[L]ike the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her; and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants: and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and, as Saint Anne, the mother of Mary; and all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with which it has molded the changing lineaments, and tinged the eyelids and the hands.

F. Gonzalez-Crussi calls wax modeling, which replaced the cadaver on the dissection table with a lifelike simulacrum, "the first successful effort we undertook to distance ourselves from the dead. Since then, we have not ceased in our efforts to deepen the gulf."The invention of ceroplasty marks the beginning of the history of the virtual cadaver, an ongoing chronicle whose latest chapter is the Visible Human Project, in which a male corpse was sliced into 1871 millimeter-thin sections with a laser, digitized, and transformed into a navigable 3-D atlas of the human body, accessible via the World Wide Web.

Paradoxically, wax anatomical models also recall us to a time when death and disease were an everyday affair and we were able to establish what Gonzalez-Crussi calls "a certain communion with the dead." La Specola's wax women offer a taste of that sacrament.

LA SPECOLA
Via Romana, 17 - 50125 Firenze
telefono biglietteria 055 2288251
Orario di apertura al pubblico: tutti i giorni dalle 9.30 alle 16.30
chiusura: lunedì
chiusure annuali: 1 gennaio, Pasqua, 1 maggio, 15 agosto, 25 dicembre

More here, courtesy the droll, endlessly fascinating Atlas Obscura, and here, at the redoubtable Curious Expeditions, and here.

Photos (except Specola Head and La Specola Twins In Utero): Joanna Ebenstein, Morbid Anatomy.com. All rights reserved.

Specola Head and La Specola Twins In Utero: Postcards. Reproduced under Fair Use provision of copyright law.

Dr_Barnowl writes "The BBC reports that Sony is to convert its online bookstore to the EPUB format. While this format still allows DRM, it's supported on a much wider variety of readers. Is this a challenge to the Kindle? It's nice to see Sony opening up to the idea of open standards. Even if you still have reservations about buying a Sony device, you might be able to patronize their bookstore sometime soon."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

xp65 writes "For decades, scientists have puzzled over the mystery of why temperatures in the solar corona, the sun's outer atmosphere, soar to several million Kelvin (K) — much hotter than temperatures nearer the sun's surface. New observations made with instruments aboard Japan's Hinode satellite reveal the culprit to be nanoflares. Nanoflares are small, sudden bursts of heat and energy. 'They occur within tiny strands that are bundled together to form a magnetic tube called a coronal loop,' says astrophysicist James Klimchuk. Coronal loops are the fundamental building blocks of the thin, translucent gas known as the sun's corona. The discovery that nanoflares play an important and perhaps dominant role in coronal heating paves the way to understanding how the sun affects Earth and its atmosphere."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Briden writes "Earlier this week, we discussed the EFF's criticism of the Burning Man Photo Policy. Burning Man has now responded at length on their own blog. Here's an excerpt: 'In fact, there are but two essential reasons we maintain these increased controls on behalf of our community: to protect our participants so that images that violate their privacy are not displayed, and to prevent companies from using Burning Man to sell products. We don't remove images from pages just because they criticize us (I've never been involved in taking down an image from an editorial blog criticizing Burning Man, and it's certainly not because there haven't been any!). We're also not at all interested preventing participants from sharing their personal imagery or impressions of the event on third party sharing sites in a noncommercial manner, so long as they observe the concerns about privacy and commercialism. We're delighted to see people sharing videos, stories, and pictures on our official Facebook page, and we know that it, along with Flickr, YouTube, Vimeo, etc. are representative of the way many of us share personal imagery in the digital age.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Carl Malamud sez,

Earlier this year, 20 million pages of the U.S. Federal Court's PACER database were downloaded, audited for privacy violations, and submitted as evidence to the Judicial Conference, the policy-making body of the courts. That incident led to a Senate investigation, clean-up by 30 district courts, and PACER now requires each lawyer to click at each login that they understand their privacy requirements. (Scribd, PDF )

When public data is locked up behind a cash register, nobody has an incentive to fix privacy problems. Only when the public got access to the data did privacy problems begin to be fixed. When public data becomes public, we also start to see real innovation.

A great example is today's release by Princeton's Center for Information Technology Policy of RECAP, a Firefox plugin. RECAP is a public domain proxy that allows professional PACER users--lawyers, journalists, and law students--to save money on access charges and at the same time create a public domain archive. RECAP lets lawyers do good by doing good.

Here's how it works. The 20 million pages harvested earlier this year have been unfolded into the Internet Archive by the Princeton team in a format that includes extras like metadata and SHA1 hashes. When you use the RECAP plugin to access uscourts.gov, if somebody already grabbed this doc, you get it for free. If not, you pay $0.08/page, but the doc gets recycled so the next user gets it free.

Better Access to Public Court Records

Previously on Boing Boing:

• Carl Malamud, rogue archivist, in Wired
• California construction codes liberated
• US Judiciary opts to spend millions on accessing its own records, which are now available on the Web for free
• Did the US gov't sell exclusive access to its legislative history to Thomson West?
• Loads more US caselaw online for free

Carl sez, "'Domain Tasters' who grab a domain name for a few days and then return it before having to pay have been thwarted by a new ICANN policy that charges for excessive returns. Monthly returned domains have dropped 99.7% from a year ago."

Domain tasters managed to make money with the practice, which essentially cost them nothing, in several ways. By registering variants of some domain name in bulk, it would be possible to direct them all to a simple webpage that harvested revenue from advertising services (Google, for example, acted to block the practice around the same time ICANN did). These could be used to quickly grab users looking for something related to a current event, or to sample a wide range of typos for a popular site; any names with staying power could be kept, while the rest could be discarded after a few days at no cost.

An alternate approach was to track users as they searched for the availability of different domain names, then register anything they considered. If the user ultimately tried to register one, the domain taster could offer to part with the one they'd registered at an inflated price; if nothing happened in a few days, the name was returned.

"Domain tasters" bitter as new fees put an end to their games (Thanks, Carl!)

Mathematicians at the University of Ottawa, Philip Munz, Ioan Hudea, Joe Imad and Robert J. Smith, have published "When Zombies Attack! Mathematical Modelling of a Zombie Outbreak!" It's a serious look at the mathematical epidemiology of zombiism, published in "Infectious Disease Modelling Research Progress."

Zombies are a popular figure in pop culture/entertainment and they are usually portrayed as being brought about through an outbreak or epidemic. Consequently, we model a zombie attack, using biological assumptions based on popular zombie movies. We introduce a basic model for zombie infection, determine equilibria and their stability, and illustrate the outcome with numerical solutions. We then refine the model to introduce a latent period of zombification, whereby humans are infected, but not infectious, before becoming undead. We then modify the model to include the effects of possible quarantine or a cure. Finally, we examine the impact of regular, impulsive reductions in the number of zombies and derive conditions under which eradication can occur. We show that only quick, aggressive attacks can stave off the doomsday scenario: the collapse of society as zombies overtake us all.

PDF: When Zombies Attack! Mathematical Modelling of a Zombie Outbreak! (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)

(Image: Zombies Swarm Apple Store, a Creative Commons Attribution photo from Jayel Aheram's photostream)

AlexMax2742 writes "Great news for those anxious gamers who have been waiting for a Linux and Mac version of Quake Live. Support for both is being implemented with next Tuesday's update, according to project lead Marty Stratton, who gave the release date during a press conference held at QuakeCon 2009. A video of the press conference is up at QuakeUnity." John Carmack revealed that they're working on a "premium" subscription service for Quake Live, which will allow players to configure and run their own private servers. Also at QuakeCon, a new trailer was released for id's upcoming shooter, Rage. Kotaku posted an extensive preview of Rage, saying, "I've seen no game that, in this realistic style, looks so good and has a landscape so rich with visual splendor." A detailed presentation on id Tech 5, the new game engine behind Rage, was given at SIGGRAPH 2009 last week.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Consider these two examples:

1. Amazon: "Using a workflow similar to the one you'd use to import data, you prepare a manifest file, email it to us, receive a job identifier in return, and then send us one or more specially prepared storage devices. We'll take the devices, verify them against your manifest file, copy the data from one or more S3 buckets to your device(s) and ship them back to you."

2. Apple: "Rising Card is a magic application developed by Theory11. The reason it was initially rejected after a long period of hearing nothing from Apple was that they felt the app would be confusing to customers. Of course, that was the point of the app as it's a magic trick meant to confuse people. The developers wrote Apple to explain that to them, but heard nothing back. They figured all hope was lost as this was hardly a high profile application, and Apple clearly didn't seem to care too much about it."

Amazon creates a service for developers, charges them money, and never asks what you're using the service for. They're happy to help, as long as you pay your bill.

Apple hires people who do the best they can to follow the orders from the top, and end up rejecting a magic trick app because it confuses the user (which of course is the point). Because there's no money in rejected software they can't afford to spend time with the developer to figure out whether they made a mistake.

Apple would do well to throw in the towel on this system, they're in a no-win situation. They're spending money to lose money. Amazon is making tech, and money, and their VPs are enjoying their weekend while Phil Schiller is hearing tales of woe from developers (and presumably from people inside Apple as well).

I wish Amazon would make an iPhone-like device that ran the same software as EC2. No, it wouldn't replace the iPhone, at least not right away. But what a test-bed for innovation it would be. Get down to the metal with a platform and distribution system that delivers software to users for pennies (if that much) integrated into the world's largest online store, that takes no stake in the products you're offering. Geez that sounds a lot like the PC or Mac market. Of course that can't work.

BTW, Joe Moreno of Adjix may have found a breakthrough in URL-shortening that solves all the issues we covered in Thursday's Bad Hair Day podcast. I mention it in this piece because it's the incredibly flexible S3 architecture that makes the solution possible. If it actually works, and I believe it will, I'll write it up next week.

wonkavader sends us this quote from an article in PCWorld: "In an effort to expand its Linux offerings, Dell is researching new netbook-type devices and will soon offer netbook Linux OS upgrades, a company official said on Wednesday. The company is researching the possibility of offering new Linux-based mobile devices called smartbooks, said Todd Finch, senior product marketing manager for Linux clients, at the OpenSourceWorld conference in San Francisco. The company will also upgrade its Ubuntu Linux OS for netbooks to the latest version in the next few weeks ... Smartbooks with Arm chips have inherent advantages over x86 chips like Atom, such as lower power consumption and longer battery life, according to Finch. The chips are also becoming more powerful, as indicated by the growing number of applications on smartphones, he said. 'I think it's natural and reasonable for us to begin looking at them as they begin scaling their processors up.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

(Video: Bob Dylan performing "Blowin' in the Wind," 1963, from No Direction Home.)

New Jersey police detained 68-year old American music star Bob Dylan recently, after a young officer failed to recognize him. A disheveled Dylan was wearing a hoodie, wandering around in the rain looking at a house for sale. The 24-year-old female officer was responding to a phone call from the occupants of a home that had a "For Sale" sign on it. The residents were called in with a report of an "eccentric-looking old man" in their yard

"We got a call for a suspicious person,'' Buble said. "It was pouring rain outside, and I was right around the corner so I responded. By that time he was walking down the street. I asked him what he was doing in the neighborhood and he said he was looking at a house for sale."

"I asked him what his name was and he said, 'Bob Dylan,' Buble said. "Now, I've seen pictures of Bob Dylan from a long time ago and he didn't look like Bob Dylan to me at all. He was wearing black sweatpants tucked into black rain boots, and two raincoats with the hood pulled down over his head.

"So I said, 'OK Bob, what are you doing in Long Branch?' He said he was touring the country with Willie Nelson and John Mellencamp. So now I'm really a little fishy about his story. I did not know what to believe or where he was coming from, or even who he was. We see a lot of people on our beat, and I wasn't sure if he came from one of our hospitals or something," Buble said.

ABC News (via Eddie Codel)

Vesti la giubba! Spotted on YouTube by BB pal Drew Carey, this 1960s Rice Krispies commercial is an award winner. Simpsons fans may recall Krusty the Klown paying homage to it as well. (via @DrewFromTV)

Earth Brooch Silver is a piece of jewelry made from a custom-selected piece of topography, 3D printed in wax and then cast in silver. I've been working with my friend Matt Mechtley to print out geographies on my MakerBot using USGS data, but these folks have got it down! Via Core77.

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Arts | Digg this!

Lucas123 writes "This year at KansasFest, computer fans from around the world gathered to celebrate the Apple II — the computer that put Apple on the map. But the Apple-1 (a.k.a. the Apple I), the machine Steve Wozniak invented and first demonstrated at the Palo Alto Homebrew Computer Club in 1976, has always been near to my heart. In attendance at KansasFest was Vince Briel, who created an authorized reproduction the Apple-1 and showed others how to build their own. 'As a regular KansasFest attendee (and the conference's marketing director), I was one of his students. Follow along as I assemble a fully functional Apple-1 clone.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Death Metal writes with this excerpt from CNN: "About 30 children aged 3 to 12 years old and their parents are participating in a new program that uses DNA testing to identify genetic gifts and predict the future. ... The test is conducted by the Shanghai Biochip Corporation. Scientists claim a simple saliva swab collects as many as 10,000 cells that enable them to isolate eleven different genes. By taking a closer look at the genetic codes, they say they can extract information about a child's IQ, emotional control, focus, memory, athletic ability and more. For about $880, Chinese parents can sign their kids up for the test and five days of summer camp in Chongqing, where the children will be evaluated in various settings from sports to art. The scientific results, combined with observations by experts throughout the week, will be used to make recommendations to parents about what their child should pursue."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

36 amazing photos of the latest in robots from Boston.com

Scientists, students and corporations continue their work around the world in the field of robotics, persistently improving and redefining their capabilities, interfaces and roles in society. Unmanned vehicles fly above war zones, telerobotics give humans a broader virtual presence and humanoid robots gain more parity with humans, refining their movements and responses. Collected here are a handful of recent photographs of robotics in use around the world...

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Robotics | Digg this!

We mentioned the debate going on between copyright lawyers Ben Sheffner (supporting the entertainment industry's sue 'em all strategy) and William Patry (explaining why they're abusing copyright law, rather than focusing on business solutions), and Sheffner's response struck me as being wrong on a large number of points. In it, he argues that people's general hatred for the RIAA has little to do with its legal strategy, but that people just hate the music business:

I think a lot of this negative opinion was due not to specific alleged misdeeds, but to the very nature of the business and its product. Music is about fun, escapism, pleasure. The fact that music is also a business, populated with accountants, lawyers, enforcers, and other not-so-fun people, is quite jarring. It's natural that people react negatively when confronted with the harsh reality that it's about more than "the music" -- it's about making a buck.

I find this incredibly unpersuasive. It's not the fact that the music industry "makes a buck" that pisses people off, but the manner in which it does so. Sure, people have hated the industry since before Napster came around (though, I'd argue that Sheffner's not paying much attention if he doesn't realize how much greater it's become -- we're talking an order of magnitude). But, the reason was actually a precursor to what's happening today: which is that the industry was run by people who looked to screw over everyone. The history of the music business is not pretty. Sure, some people may not like "the business side," but the issue most people have is not that it's a business, but the way the business has been run. It was always designed to rip off both the artists and consumers at every turn. The folks who have run the music business for years have always looked at things as a zero sum game, rather than a market that can be expanded. So they squeezed everyone. It's just that the internet made it that much more blatant.

Sheffner then tries to back up this argument with another claim that is entirely unpersuasive:

The contrast with the public's attitude toward the software industry is instructive. The Business Software Alliance, the industry's equivalent of the RIAA, is very aggressive in its enforcement efforts, famously offering bounties for ratting out software pirates.... But my sense (admittedly anecdotal) is that most people have little problem with the BSA acting to enforce its members' copyrights; it's certainly a far less unpopular organization than the RIAA. (Can you imagine the outcry if the RIAA offered rewards for turning in your friends who "share" music without paying for it?) Why the difference? My hypothesis is that people have no trouble accepting that software is a serious business, and that owners of software copyrights, who spend millions developing their programs, have every right to stop people from copying them for free.

First, perhaps it's because Sheffner hasn't spent much time around the software industry, but the hatred of the BSA runs incredibly deep as well. And, yes, people find their marketing schemes to be totally ridiculous as publicity stunts. The BSA is also regularly mocked (not just by us, but by the mainstream press) for its annual rollout of BS stats on piracy, that falsely count every copy as a lost sale, and then double, triple and quadruple count "ripple effects" on the economy, but never account for how the savings from not buying overpriced software also "ripple" through the economy.

Furthermore, the rather obvious reason why it's a smaller group of people up in arms about the BSA's tactics is that the average person rarely buys software. Most people buy a computer pre-loaded with software, and then maybe download a few applications. But actually going out and getting new software occurs a lot less often than the average person gets new music.

The RIAA's tactics have received more attention because it's a larger community that interfaces with them on a regular basis. It's got nothing to do with some mystical feeling that floats around music.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

I've been meaning to publish a series of posts on the problems with the current attempts at patent reform that I hope to get to soon, but the punchline to it is that the real problem with the patent system is that it does a terrible job evaluating "obviousness." The various attempts at reform don't deal with this issue at all, and thus the problems will continue. While things have become a little better due to the Supreme Court's Teleflex ruling, which changed the standard for "obviousness" on certain patents, it's still a major problem. Patents are only supposed to be awarded on things that are new and non-obvious to those skilled in the art. But, for years, the "non-obvious" part has basically been ignored in favor of the "new." That's because all the Patent Office looks at is "prior art." I've had discussions with people in the comments who insist this makes perfect sense (most of these people are lawyers). The problem, though, is that just because something is new doesn't mean it's not obvious. It could just be a natural progression or maybe it's just an implementation that someone finally got around to doing.

However, Tim Lee and Julian Sanchez got into a discussion about the recent injunction against Microsoft Word over a blatantly obvious patent, and Julian did a great job explaining why obviousness and newness are different and why explaining obviousness can be so difficult. The argument is that since it's so difficult to explain obviousness, patent examiners just don't bother, and instead focus on the "newness" part:

The problem is that if an applicant wants to appeal, the examiner, who may well be a programmer, has to defend his subjective judgment of what's "obvious" with some kind of explicit argument. And the result (says Tim) is that in practice the "non-obviousness" requirement has been largely conflated with a review of the "prior art" or previous related inventions. The upshot is that unless someone else has done almost exactly the same thing before, you've got a good shot at getting the patent. Maybe this is motivated by a version of the no-five-dollar-bills-on-the-sidewalk fallacy in economics: If nobody has done it before, it can't have been all that obvious. But, of course, in a rapidly evolving area of technology, someone's always going to be the first to do something obvious.

I think the source of the problem in the patent system may be linked to a point Friedrich Hayek made long ago about our tendency to overrate the economic importance of theoretical knowledge and vastly underestimate the importance of tacit or practical knowledge. The non-obviousness requirement, tied to the standard of an observer skilled in the appropriate art, is supposed to make the patent system sensitive to this kind of knowledge. But if examiners have to defend their judgments of obviousness, they're essentially being required to translate their tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge--to turn an inarticulate knack into a formal set of rules or steps. And Hayek's point was that this is often going to be difficult, if not impossible. Just as a loose analogy, consider that in the Principia Mathematica, Bertrand Russell and A.N. Whitehead's attempt to provide a rigorous, formalized basis for ordinary arithmetic, it takes several hundred pages to strictly establish the proposition "1+1=2." It takes a fairly advanced mathematical education to understand the explicit elaboration of a practice (counting, adding) that we expect most children to master.

If you ask me how I knew the way to go about writing the translation program in question, I'm not sure I could tell you--just as we sometimes find ourselves at a loss when we're asked to give explicit directions for a route we know by heart. Things that are "obvious" are often the hardest to explain or articulate explicitly, precisely because we're so accustomed to apprehending them by an unconscious (and possibly itself quite dizzyingly complicated) process. The very term "obvious" comes from the Latin obviam for "in the way"--that is, right in front of you, where you can't help but see it. Except the visual processing system we "use" automatically is vastly more sophisticated than what we're (thus far) capable of designing. If you had to describe explicitly the unconscious process by which you see what's right in front of you, it wouldn't seem "obvious" at all. The same, I expect, goes for the knack of knowing how to go about solving a particular problem in coding or engineering--with the result that the patent system systematically undervalues the tacit knowledge embedded in those skill sets until it's embedded in a piece of "prior art." So knowledge that's widespread but implicit and inarticulate is routinely mistaken for the kind of innovation it's necessary to incentivize with a monopoly grant. In effect, the hidden value of dispersed tacit knowledge is redistributed to the first person to render it explicit.

That's about the best description of why prior art is not the best test for obviousness that I've ever seen. Brilliant. But, if that's the case, how could you test obviousness? I've always believed that the test is actually laid out directly in the law itself. If it's supposed to be whether or not the invention is non-obvious to those skilled in the art, you should ask those skilled in the art. You could still have an examiner who would be in charge of weighing what those people say, but if they all explain how or why something appears to be obvious to them, that should be a pretty big clue that there's a problem. The idea that this would lead to people lying about something being obvious (or believing it's obvious in retrospect) has mostly been debunked. It turns out that people aren't quite as dishonest as some patent attorneys believe.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

cloude-pottier writes "What do you do when zombies attack? Turn to a mathematician to come up with a model for the spread of a zombie infestation, of course! Students at Carleton University and the University of Ottawa have published a paper in a book titled Infectious Disease Modelling Research Progress detailing how to model the spread of a zombie population and various complications in managing the spread of the infestation. They even give humans a fighting chance in some cases! The original paper (PDF) can be found at their professor's website."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Andrew Rapp made this neat application to help you quickly find appropriate colors to use for your LED project. He hooked up an RGB LED (that is, a single LED module that has red, green, and blue LEDs built into it) to a color picker dialog box on his computer, allowing him to change the color of his light by clicking on his screen.

If you are like me and have never really studied color theory, Geoffrey Milburn has a nice explanation about how additive color mixing works.

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Arduino | Digg this!

I have to admit, it's been really fun to watch various bands experiment with neat new ways to give people real reasons to buy -- each one different than the last, but each one equally as creative. What's really cool, too, is how many different musicians (both well-known and not so well-known) have been reaching out to us lately, to share their own experiences, and to talk about how this site and the various talks I've given have inspired them to experiment further. It's really humbling to see so much creativity in action. Here are two more examples.

The first is that the band the Flaming Lips are offering both free studio downloads with any concert tickets, but also a promise that they'll send you a link after the show you attend to download that recording as well. The band is clearly recognizing that it's the concert ticket that matters, and the actual music just makes that ticket more valuable (infinite goods increasing the value of scarce goods... where have we heard that before...).

Then there's the band Health, who has a new album coming out, and in order to convince people that it's worth buying the actual album, they've put special prize tickets in 66 of the albums. The tickets grants the buyers certain unique prizes, including the grand prize of a weekend in LA to hang out with the band (including round-trip flight, and hanging out with the band at an amusement park and the zoo). Other prizes will get you (among other things):

personal gifts, t-shirts, locks of a band member's hair, fur from a band member's cat, and posters or records signed by the band in their own blood.

After that, there are a bunch of other oddities:

• We will get steadily inebriated with you over i-chat while working on a project together
• A historical themed phone call from the band
• A recording of BJ (band member) covering a 90's song of your choice
• A recording of a short story read by a band member
• We'll personalize your voicemail greeting
• A bouquet of flowers from the band
• An astrological consultation with Jupiter's mother
• A copy of John Famiglietti's student film
• An uplifting phone call from Health's manager
• A personality test hand completed by a band member
• A bag of Jupiter's cat hair, plus a photo of her
• BJ's old little league jacket
• A childhood toy
• Knitted scarf made by Jake's Mother
• Band member fingerprints
• Mixed tape/cd hand decorated by the band
• Health's high school band's cd mixtape
• A painting by John's mother
• Learn a magic trick from our manager via video chat
• We conference crank call a prominent indie musician together

In many ways, this is like Josh Freese's unique offering, but rather than getting people to buy the big prizes, you just buy the album with a chance to win those packages. Yet again, another band having fun, connecting with fans and giving them a reason to buy. Hmm... I wonder if these ideas can inspire more options for our own little CwF + RtB experiment.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

Writing on behalf of the The Burning Man Organization (BMO), Andie Grace has issued a response to the EFF blog post which criticized the annual fest's photo policies as overly restrictive:

Believe me, I'd love to see a better solution than wading through piles of images to approve certain public uses (and turn down or enforce against others) every year, but after 10 years working with these licenses and observing their utility during the evolution of the digital age, the only thing I'm certain of is that the issue is not as simple as the EFF would like you to think.

Example: find me a participant who would vote "yes" on seeing a video or photo of the Man burning, or their own art car or sculpture, in a car commercial. You probably can't - but even the Creative Commons Noncommercial license wouldn't enable Burning Man itself to enforce against such use, nor the dozens of other similar violations it sees each year because the car company would claim (correctly) that Burning Man has no standing to enforce the Creative Commons license, only the photographer does -- and what if the photographer was the one who sold the image to the ad agency in the first place? What if we couldn't locate the photographer to join forces with us? A Creative Commons license simply does not provide Burning Man the direct ability to enforce against such use - something we've unfortunately run up against many times as we work to keep such commercialist wolves at bay.

"Snatching Digital Rights" or Protecting Our Culture? Burning Man and the EFF (blog.burningman.com)

(Livingbrush Woman Art by Scott Fray, Image by Bryce Hunt)

Someone submitted the following anonymously, suggesting that it was a bad idea, but it seems like a worthwhile experiment to me. EA announced a pre-order offering for a special "Collector's Edition" version of its game Dragon Age, which includes a fancy steel case, a cloth map of the world, a "making-of" documentary, a soundtrack of the game and a bunch of other extras. It basically sounds just like what many musicians are now doing by offering special deluxe packages for serious fans. It's a way to segment customers, so some can buy the cheaper regular version, and others, who really, really like the game, can go all out and get the deluxe set -- including all sorts of scarce goods that can't be "pirated."

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story

The little fella sure does get around. Mashable has ten examples of "crasher squirrel as meme" photoshoppery right here, but I bet many more exist. Why don't you tell me about them in the comments.

Previously: Crashing Squirrel

Hugh Pickens writes "The NY Times reports that the Army began encouraging its personnel — from the privates to the generals — to go online and collaboratively rewrite seven of the field manuals that give instructions on all aspects of Army life, using the same software behind Wikipedia. The goal, say the officers behind the effort, is to tap more experience and advice from battle-tested soldiers rather than relying on the specialists within the Army's array of colleges and research centers, who have traditionally written the manuals. 'For a couple hundred years, the Army has been writing doctrine in a particular way, and for a couple months, we have been doing it online in this wiki,' said Col. Charles J. Burnett, the director of the Army's Battle Command Knowledge System. 'The only ones who could write doctrine were the select few. Now, imagine the challenge in accepting that anybody can go on the wiki and make a change — that is a big challenge, culturally.' Under the three-month pilot program, the current version of each guide can be edited by anyone around the world who has been issued an ID card that allows access to the Army Internet system. Reaction so far from the rank and file has been tepid, but the brass is optimistic; even in an open-source world, soldiers still know how to take an order."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A media consultant, Arnon Mishkin, has a post up at Paid Content supposedly about The Fallacy Of The Link Economy, where he suggests that those of us (he links to us at Techdirt, for example) who are insisting that aggregators aren't a problem and that news sites should be happy about getting linked to, are wrong. But he seems to have gotten the basic argument wrong. He seems to think we're saying that the all you have to do is get linked to, and you should be happy.

But that's not what we're saying.

The link is a vote of confidence, but it's just a start. From there, you then need to actually do something with that link. Mishkin dismisses the value of the link by noting that most people who visit those aggregator sites don't click through. That's not news. That's the way it's always been, but that doesn't mean there isn't value there. On this, I can speak from personal experience. Over the years, we never worked that hard at building our own traffic (we never built a business that depended on traffic), but our traffic kept growing. Any time we were linked to from larger sites, some people clicked through, but we always knew it was a small fraction of the overall traffic to that originator site. But, so what? It's still new traffic that wouldn't have found us otherwise. On top of that, we knew that most of that traffic would visit us just that one time and not think to come back -- but again, that's fine. Because what did happen is that we started to build up our reputation.

So, no, getting a single site to link to you isn't that meaningful, and won't drive that much traffic initially (or even repeat traffic), but as you build up your reputation, and get linked multiple times in multiple places, and then build up credibility based on your content and your community then people start to come back. So, getting linked from a certain site once is meaningless. But as we would get linked multiple times, we'd start to notice that then our traffic would increase. It was a case of that other site helping introduce others to us, not because of a single link, but the combination of being linked to multiple times, along with having good content and good discussions -- and then people would realize that it was worth visting us regularly (or adding us to their RSS reader or whatever).

It's an ongoing process, but the fact that most people don't click through on a single aggregator link is meaningless. Those people wouldn't have seen the story anyway, but it may help build up the brand of the original site. And, I can assure you, over time, if you keep providing quality, that pays off.

The problem here is that Mishkin and others seem to think the value is in the single atomic story. It's not and never has been. Being unable to view the larger picture and the overall process misses the point. It's not the link alone that has value or the story alone that has value, but the overall process of building a community.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story