Hugh Pickens writes "Farhad Manjoo writes in Slate that while the iPhone commands nearly 14 percent of smartphone sales and BlackBerry about 21 percent, Android has only 3 percent. And even though Android is far friendlier to developers, it has failed to attract anywhere near the number of apps now clogging the iPhone. Manjoo writes that Google went wrong by giving handset manufacturers and carriers too much control over the design and marketing of Android phones so there is no idealized 'Google phone' — instead, Android devices get names like the T-Mobile G1 or the myTouch 3G, and each is marketed separately and comes with its own distinct capabilities and shortcomings. 'Outside handset manufacturers lack ambition — -none of them even seems to be trying to match the capabilities of the iPhone, let alone to knock us down with features that far surpass those of Apple's device,' writes Manjoo. 'A smart handset manufacturer could build a top-of-the-line Android device that outshines Apple's phone in at least a few areas — better battery life, a much better Web browser, a brighter or bigger screen, faster or more functional controls... something that might help Android inspire gadget lust. But so far, that's not happening.' John Gruber echoes this advice and adds this advice to Android manufacturers: 'If Apple is BMW, you can be Porsche.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

SpuriousLogic writes "Only one crime was solved for each 1,000 CCTV cameras in London last year, a report into the city's surveillance network has claimed. The internal police report found the million-plus cameras in London rarely help catch criminals. In one month CCTV helped capture just eight out of 269 suspected robbers. David Davis MP, the former shadow home secretary, said: 'It should provoke a long overdue rethink on where the crime prevention budget is being spent.' He added: 'CCTV leads to massive expense and minimum effectiveness. It creates a huge intrusion on privacy, yet provides little or no improvement in security. The Metropolitan Police has been extraordinarily slow to act to deal with the ineffectiveness of CCTV.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

David writes in -

This is crying for a remake! Very cool homemade yet pro looking: Arcade Game cabinet / home brewed beer dispenser! And No Quarters needed haha!

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The NY Times checked in with its own version of the story about sports leagues restricting what fans can do in the stands to share their experience -- a story that we've already covered. However, Romenesko points us to a little tidbit down at the bottom of the NYT article, talking about other leagues that have tried to do something similar, mentioning that a sports league in Wisconsin went so far as to send invoices to newspapers it felt were "live blogging" its events. We had written about this dispute a few months ago, but I hadn't heard about the invoices before.

Every newspaper who received an invoice smartly ignored it, but the whole concept is ridiculous. The league is claiming that such a live blogging of what's happening at the sports event counts as a "broadcast" and thus should be required to pay the same fees that, say, local radio stations pay to broadcast the events. But the idea that you can stop people from, or charge people for, telling the world what's happening in a sporting venue is preposterous, not just from a legal or technological standpoint, but because these events depend on news coverage for advertising. Attempting to charge newspapers (or fans) for trying to keep others informed seems incredibly self-defeating.

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Carla and I went to the 2009 San Francisco Zine Fest on Sunday. I was surprised to discover that the world of print zines is as vibrant and fun as it was back when bOING bOING was being published in the 80s and 90s.

I took photos of quite a few zine publishers who were in attendance, which I'll share with you over the next several days.

First up is Sean Logic, shown above. When I asked to take his photo, Sean covered his face with a copy of his one-shot zine, The Great MySpace Swindle, which is a griefer-lite account of how he set up a MySpace account pretending to be "Amber, a busty beautiful brunette who loved nothing more than to party and throw gang signs at the camera." The zine compiled all the responses to "Amber." Kind of a mean trick, but at least he didn't reveal the true names and accounts of the men who sent messages!

If you're interested in ordering a copy of The Great MySpace Swindle, send an email to myspace_swindle@yahoo.com. I think it cost $2, but I can't remember for sure.

Techdirt is reporting that one particularly rabid anti-spam fighter has not only lost his case, but most of his worldly possessions as well. James Gordon tried to set himself up as an ISP to get around the conventions of the CAN SPAM act in order to set up a litigation house designed to sue companies that spam. Unfortunately a judge did not take kindly to this trick and ordered him to pay $110,000 to the firm he was suing, a decision that was not only upheld on appeal but accompanied by some very unkind words trying to shut down litigation mills like his. "But, perhaps even more fascinating is that the guy, James Gordon, didn't just lose the lawsuit, it appears he lost most of his possessions as well. Remember that ruling telling him to pay the $110k to Virtumundo? He refused. The company sent the debt to a collections agency, but told Gordon they'd call off the collections agency if he dropped the appeal. Gordon didn't."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Most home metal-casters use traditional green-sand molding techniques to cast parts. Typically, a two-part molding flask is packed with specially-treated sand around a pattern, then the flask is carefully opened, the pattern removed, and the flask reassembled, being careful not to disturb the sand impressions, leaving a negative space in the exact shape of the original. In lost-foam casting, however, the pattern does not have to be removed before pouring in the molten metal; rather, the hot melt simply vaporizes the foam as it flows in, and replaces it. This process has a number of advantages to recommend it over the traditional technique. It does not require a two-part flask, and can be performed in a simple metal bucket. Nor does it require special sand, or special techniques for handling it. Dave Kush has a great overview on his site. Among other things, Dave uses the lost-foam process to cast homemade linear bearings for his CNC equipment.

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We've been excited to see what would happen with the RECAP Firefox extension, which is being used to help free up public domain court documents that have been locked up behind the PACER paywall. However, there were also questions about how the folks who run and/or benefit from PACER would react. We now have at least part of the answer: bogus scare tactics. Paul Alan Levy alerts us to the fact that the Federal Court system, which profits from PACER, has started sending out scare notices to try to keep lawyers from using RECAP:

The court would like to make CM/ECF filers aware of certain security concerns relating to a software application or "plug-in" called RECAP, which was designed to enable the sharing of court documents on the Internet.

Once a user loads RECAP, documents that he or she subsequently accesses via PACER are automatically sent to a public Internet repository. Other RECAP/PACER users are then able to see whether documents are available from the Internet repository. At this time, RECAP does not appear to provide users with access to restricted or sealed documents.

Please be aware that RECAP is "open-source" software, which means it can be freely obtained by anyone with Internet access and could possibly be modified for benign or malicious purposes. This raises the possibility that the software could be used for facilitating unauthorized access to restricted or sealed documents. Accordingly, CM/ECF filers are reminded to be diligent about their computer security and document redaction practices to ensure that documents and sensitive information are not inadvertently shared or compromised.

The court and the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts will continue to analyze the implications of RECAP or related-software and advise you of any ongoing or further concerns.

I especially like the "scare quotes" around "open-source." Of course, I'm not quite sure why the fact that the extension is open source makes it any more vulnerable to being "modified for benign or malicious purposes." Either way, looks like the Federal Courts don't like competition eating away at their PACER profits.

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The New York Times has some interesting details that are surfacing about the recent charges brought against Sergey Aleynikov, the programmer who allegedly stole code from Goldman Sachs on his way out the door to another job. "This spring, Mr. Aleynikov quit Goldman to join Teza Technologies, a new trading firm, tripling his salary to about $1.2 million, according to the complaint. He left Goldman on June 5. In the days before he left, he transferred code to a server in Germany that offers free data hosting. [...] After his arrest, Mr. Aleynikov was taken for interrogation to F.B.I. offices in Manhattan. Mr. Aleynikov waived his rights against self-incrimination, and agreed to allow agents to search his house. He said that he had inadvertently downloaded a portion of Goldman's proprietary code while trying to take files of open source software -- programs that are not proprietary and can be used freely by anyone. He said he had not used the Goldman code at his new job or distributed it to anyone else, and the criminal complaint offers no evidence that he has."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Sèvres Vase Clock, a design by Georgios Maridakis at the Royal College of Art, taps a vase you already have, every hour, and its tone can be adjusted by varying the amount of water inside. [via Cool Hunting]

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Several sources are discussing the recent attempted shutdown of The Pirate Bay by Swedish authorities. It seems that following the recent court defeats and the pending civil actions, Swedish authorities threatened TPB's main bandwidth supplier with a hefty fine in order to get them shut down. Not surprisingly TPB has relocated and is back online although the tracker still seems to be down. As a gesture of their "appreciation" TPB plans on sending a mocking t-shirt to the people believed responsible for the takedown attempt.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Six years ago, we noted in passing that a court ruling found that driving while having sex is perfectly legal in Germany (separately, it's apparently a popular practice in Russia). Part of the point was in discussing the troubling trend to try to pick off each and every "distraction" to outlaw -- and it seems like a judge in Germany is wondering the same thing. The judge, issuing a fine for a driver talking on his cell phone, started questioning whether it was legal at all to fine drivers for talking, noting how many other driver distractions were perfectly legal -- including sex, masturbation, shaving, changing the radio station and others. The judge isn't necessarily saying it's good to do those things (in fact, he notes the opposite), but he's questioning the constitutionality of banning just one of many distractions, and has apparently sent the issue to Germany Constitutional Court to examine the issue.

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Last week we asked for interview questions to help supplement our face-to-face interviews at Blizzcon. Over the course of the two-day con we were able to sit down with StarCraft II's Dustin Browder, Diablo III's Leonard Boyarsky, WoW's J. Allen Brack, and Battle.net expert Rob Pardo to answer a few questions on each of the four major camps in Blizzard at the moment. Since this wasn't a usual Slashdot-style interview, we tried to use as many of your suggestions as possible, but the conversation often took us in a unique direction once it got rolling.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apollo 12 astronaut Alan Bean was the fourth man on the Moon. In 1981, he retired from the space agency to put his otherworldly experiences on canvas. Seen above, "Tiptoeing on the Ocean of Storms" (acrylic on masonite). Bean's magnificent paintings are currently on display at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington DC. From the Smithsonian:

Bean remembers running next to this crater and feeling like he could run forever without his legs getting tired. The reason he felt "super strong" was because he weighed so little. The Moon has one-sixth the gravity of Earth, making his total body and equipment weight of about 136 kilograms (300 pounds) on Earth only 23 kilograms (50 pounds) on the Moon.  

Although carrying weight required little effort, the spacesuits were stiff and hard to move at the knee and hip joints. Astronauts learned to move mostly by ankle motion, which Bean says "feels and looks as if you are dancing on tiptoe."

"Alan Bean: Painting Apollo, First Artist on Another World"

Short video about Accenture using open source hardware (Buglabs) to prototype ideas for clients... I'm not sure if there are folks at Accenture who read MAKE (I hope some do!) but if there are, perhaps you can post up in the comment and talk a bit more about this?

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When the original ruling came out against The Pirate Bay's founders, one odd part was that there was no injunction forcing the site to stop doing anything. The entertainment industry quickly filed for one -- which seemed a bit odd, considering that the case was under appeal. The latest, however, is that a judge has ordered one of the main ISPs servicing The Pirate Bay to stop, making the site largely inaccessible. In the meantime, the gov't agency that was responsible for getting the founders to pay up has basically found that they can't find any money to collect, which aligns with what the four guys have been saying all along (that they don't own the site and don't make money from it).

Either way, congrats to the entertainment industry for temporarily wac(k)ing another mole. Considering the whole mess with GGF, it seems like most of The Pirate Bay's users are already migrating elsewhere, and a few people are setting up clone sites. Again, this certainly isn't condoning their behavior, but at what point does the industry realize that it's not helping matters. It's just further distributing the problem, making it that much more difficult to do anything legitimate.

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okapi writes "Apple announced that Mac OS X v10.6 Snow Leopard will go on sale Friday, August 28 at Apple's retail stores and Apple Authorized Resellers, and that Apple's online store is now accepting pre-orders."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Back when CAN SPAM was passed, one of the (many) parts that annoyed anti-spam fighters was that the law was quite clearly limited in who could bring lawsuits. It was basically designed so that only the government or ISPs could bring lawsuits -- not individuals. This was done on purpose, as lots of marketing companies freaked out that they'd end up dealing with constant spam lawsuits from people upset about receiving their marketing messages. However, some anti-spammers worked on ways to get around this by setting themselves up as "ISPs," though only for the purpose of trying to sue spammers. This strategy backfired. A couple of years ago, one of the most fervent supporters of using this trick (his only "job" was filing these lawsuits against spammers) lost his case, and the court even told him to pay $110k to the firm he had sued.

He appealed, and the appeals court came down even harder on the guy for clearly abusing the law, pointing out that he was clearly a professional litigant, and not someone running a real ISP. But, perhaps even more fascinating is that the guy, James Gordon, didn't just lose the lawsuit, it appears he lost most of his possessions as well. Remember that ruling telling him to pay the $110k to Virtumundo? He refused. The company sent the debt to a collections agency, but told Gordon they'd call off the collections agency if he dropped the appeal. Gordon didn't:

When Virtumundo's collections lawyer showed up at Gordon's house with a moving van and a sheriff, Virtumundo again offered to stop its pursuit of Gordon's assets if he would drop his appeal, and he refused again, according to Newman.

Virtumundo's collections agency then cleared out Gordon's house, according to Newman.

He added that after seizing the contents of Gordon's home, Virtumundo offered to return Gordon's belongings if he would drop his appeal and again, Gordon refused.

As much as I thank anti-spam activists for trying to stomp out spam, that doesn't mean they get to ignore what the law allows, and set up what was effectively a professional anti-spam litigation service.

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The folks in the video above aren't watching a fireworks show but rather the near-constant lightning strikes that occur over Vaenezuela's Catatumbo River almost half of the year. Apparently, sailors have dubbed the lightning "Maracaibo Beacon" because it can be used as a navigational aid. According to the excellent Atlas Obscura, there might be as many as 280 strikes per hour during 10 hour stretches. From Atlas Obscura (photo below from Wikipedia):

(The phenomenon) was first written about in the 1597 poem "The Dragontea" by Lope de Vega. De Vega tells of Sir Francis Drake's 1595 attempt to take the city of Maracaibo by night, only to have his plans foiled when the lightning storm's flashes gave away his position to the city's defenders.

It's still unknown exactly why this area--and this area alone--should produce such regular lighting. One theory holds that ionized methane gas rising from the Catatumbo bogs is meeting with storm clouds coming down from the Andes, helping to create the perfect conditions for a lighting storm.

Relampago del Catatumbo

Latest "Gadget FreaK' is up - Build your own universal remote control

Couch potatoes should be particularly interested in Bill Bowden's remote control IR receiver, which allows users to control the power of virtually any electrical appliance (including those not equipped for remote) using their standard remote control. It's based on an IR receiver circuit, which is basically a simple toggle switch that features a 48KHz IR receiver module to convert IR signals to 5V digital data representing the particular command sent. So switch a fan or lights on and off, blend up a pitcher of margaritas, pop popcorn and more, all without leaving your couch — possibly ever.

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Michael J. Ross writes "There are countless content management systems (CMSs) available for building websites, and they offer varying levels of built-in functionality. But once a site developer has successfully installed any given CMS, a critical form of help (or hindrance) is the CMS's documentation, which for some CMSs is quite impressive, and for others absolutely atrocious. Joomla is a powerful and popular choice for Web developers, but can be daunting to newbies confused by its non-intuitive menu structure and restrictive content hierarchy. The documentation for Joomla is frequently criticized, for various reasons, and that may largely account for the popularity of third-party books — such as Barrie M. North's Joomla! 1.5: A User's Guide, now in its second edition." Read on for the rest of Michael and Ethelyn's review.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Oleg over at Circuits@Home is developing a host mode USB shield for the Arduino platform. This should allow you to easily hook up those cool USB gadgets you have laying around! The board is based around the MAX3421E USB controller from Maxim. [via hackaday]

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When people don't have signs or other external cues for direction, we will probably end up walking in circles. That's according to a new psychological study conducted by researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen, Germany. For example, someone trying to walk straight through a dense forest on a day where the sun is blocked by clouds will likely start drifting into more of a circular path after just 100 meters or less. From Science News:

Circular walking occurs when people have to rely solely on bodily cues, such as rotational shifts and joint movements, to estimate the location of “straight ahead,” (researcher Jan) Souman hypothesizes. As random errors in bodily feedback accumulate, a person eventually drifts to one side or the other. A walker dependent on bodily cues may first make a circle to the right, drift back to a straight-ahead direction, start to zigzag and then make a circle to the left.

“You may think that you’re walking in a straight line, but in fact the direction you’re walking in is drifting more and more away from straight ahead, making you walk in circles,” Souman says...

Psychologist John Rieser of Vanderbilt University in Nashville calls the new findings exciting. He and his colleagues have found that blindfolded people veer off course but don’t circle when walking up to 100 meters across a grassy field. But cues from the ground, such as variations in grass length in an otherwise predictable environment, may have reduced veering from a straight line, Rieser says. “I suspect that one’s subjective sense of straight ahead, and up-down too, are easily changed by environmental conditions,” he remarks.

"How to walk in circles without really trying"

We've seen plenty of creative USB flash drive rehousings in the past, but the above vid from NetbookNews gives a peek into the original manufacturing process for the popular device. Hmm - would be kind of neat if the drives were also available caseless. [Thanks, Sascha!]

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Just Posted: Our review of the Sony DSLR A380. This is our first review of one of Sony's latest trio of entry-level DSLRs. Although the specification hasn't changed significantly compared to its predecessor, the A350, its intent has - it's a DSLR clearly designed to reach out to compact camera users thinking of making the leap to the world of large sensors. So how comfortable did we feel in its embrace?

Shawn Barber has a new series of paintings up at San Francisco's Shooting Gallery. Continuing his documentation of tattoo culture, this collection features portraits of tattooed individuals and also scenes from a tattoo studio. The exhibition, titled "Tattooed Portraits: Snapshots," can also be viewed online. BB pal Jess Hemerly interviewed Barber for 7x7:

7x7: I have no tattoos but I admire beautiful ink, and there's something about your paintings that makes me want to cover myself in tattoos. What draws you to ink as a subject?

Shawn Barber: The medium saturates everything that I do. Tattooing gives so much more than it takes. It allows an individual to acknowledge life with permanent markers. Getting tattooed is a leap of faith that reminds you of that exact time and place for the rest of your life.

"Shawn Barber Makes Us Want To Cover Ourselves in Tattoos" (7x7)

Shawn Barber: Tattooed Portraits (Shooting Gallery)

The first release of the River2 aggregator was all about CSS. I wanted to be sure this new aggregator would be buzzword compliant and user-configurable. I wanted the design community to have their way with this tool.

The second release has a completely different set of goals, they relate to the subscription engine, realtime processing of updates, and podcast support. Specifically...

1. Dynamic reading list support. A reading list is an OPML file that contains a subscription list that is read every time the aggregator scans its feeds. Any new feeds are subscribed to, and any feeds that are no longer in the list are unsubbed, assuming they aren't in another reading list or were independently subscribed to. This feature has been in my aggregators but not in most others. Google Reader, for example, does not support this feature, but imho it should. I'm putting this out there to help lead the market.

2. Fully rssCloud compliant. If you subscribe to a feed that has a cloud element, and you aren't behind a firewall or NAT, River2 will request notification, so that updates are received in realtime.

3. A podcatcher that's not from Apple. The market needs more than one podcatcher. So if you subscribe to a feed that has enclosures, it will download them into a folder of your choosing. This works for photo feeds as well as feeds with audio and video.

Tying it all together, here's a reading list that contains podcast feeds, one of which is cloud-enabled.

This release is not ready for download yet. Because I got a bad cold, and was sidelined last week, the project was set back by a week. But developers are moving ahead with their rssCloud implementations, and will need something to test against. That's one important role of River2, it represents a reference implementation of the client side of the rssCloud protocol.

What's next after this River2 release? More cloud-enabled feeds. An editorial tool that produces cloud-enabled feeds.

Precision submits "Intel Corp., the largest maker of chips in the world, has outlined plans to make chips using 4nm process technology in about thirteen years. According to Intel, integration capacity of chips will increase much higher compared to fabrication process."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Earlier this year, we wrote about how model Liskula Cohen bizarrely sued Google and an anonymous blogger for putting up a blog that referred to Cohen as a skank, an old hag, a "ho" and a few other choice phrases. Of course, pretty much no one would have seen such a blog if Cohen hadn't gone legal about it, claiming (with no proof) that she was losing jobs because of it (which seems difficult to believe). We were disappointed that a judge found the insults on the blog to be "defamatory," and ordered Google to reveal the blogger -- which it did. However, the now revealed blogger, Rosemary Port, is now pissed off and planning to sue Google for $15 million for exposing her.

As much as I agree that she should have been able to remain anonymous, I'm not sure what legal grounds Port has to make such a claim. Her attorney says Google: "breached its fiduciary duty to protect her expectation of anonymity," which hardly seems likely to stand up in court. Google had no such fiduciary duty, and was ordered by a court to give up the name. Her lawyer is right in noting that anonymity is "inherent in the First Amendment" (and many courts have found this to be true), but that has nothing to do with Google. Google is not the US gov't and the First Amendment doesn't apply to Google. I would have no problem with a lawsuit appealing the ruling to reveal Port's name, but that's not a lawsuit against Google. Bad lawsuits begat bad lawsuits.

Separately, Cohen's own lawyer is claiming that Cohen is dropping the defamation lawsuit against Port (which is not what she was claiming last week) and the whole thing seems to have descended into screaming back and forth -- with arguments over who should forgive whom.

But there is one other interesting tidbit. We've pointed out how ridiculous the original lawsuit was, as it only called that much more attention to Cohen and the idea that someone finds her "skanky." Port claims that probably the only two people who saw the site prior to the lawsuit were Port and Cohen. When it was pointed out that this whole lawsuit brought a lot more attention to the idea of Cohen as a "skank," Cohen's lawyer claims "If we had thought for a minute that the Google case would have brought more attention to the anonymous blogger's site, we never would have started it." Perhaps that's true, but if it is, Cohen and her lawyer seem particularly clueless about how the internet works and how news spreads.

In the end, this whole thing has the feel of a big publicity stunt, wasting public resources and the court system to get both Cohen, and now Port, a bunch of free media coverage. Basically, we have back and forth lawsuits that are really just attention-grabbing attempts by people who felt "insulted" by others' actions. Despite Port's claims that the founding fathers wanted to preserve her right to privacy, this legal mud-wresting contest is probably not what they had in mind.

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Researchers have caught rare "upside-down" lighting on video. Duke University scientists captured the gigantic jet shooting 40 miles up from the top of a thunderstorm.

Images of gigantic jets have only been recorded on five occasions since 2001. The Duke University team caught a one-second view and magnetic field measurements that are now giving scientists a much clearer understanding of these rare events.

"This confirmation of visible electric discharges extending from the top of a storm to the edge of the ionosphere provides an important new window on processes in Earth's global electrical circuit," said Brad Smull, program director in NSF's Division of Atmospheric Sciences, which funded the research.

"Our measurements show that gigantic jets are capable of transferring a substantial electrical charge to the lower ionosphere," (Duke professor Steven) Cummer said.
"They are essentially upward lightning from thunderclouds that deliver charge just like conventional cloud-to-ground lightning. What struck us was the size of this event."

"Lightning's Mirror Image ... Only Much Bigger"

Glasskulls.com, though short on "who," is long on "how," featuring nice big, clear photos illustrating the process of going from wax master to finished art glass casting. Inferring from the scattered comments, I think the artist's name is "Donn." If so: Nice work, Donn, and thanks for showing us how it's done.

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With Nintendo's Metroid Prime Trilogy -- all three Metroid Prime games collected on a single disc and updated with Wii controls -- just released this week, we spent the day with Austin-native developer Retro Studios to learn how the classic franchise fell into their laps, the process of re-interpreting it in first person, and how to read Nintendo's haiku-like approach to game development. Elsewhere on Offworld, we took an extended look at two of the best games released in recent weeks: the similarly classically Metroid-esque Xbox Live Arcade game Shadow Complex, and the fantastic downsizing of the Rock Band experience with Harmonix and Backbone's PSP game Rock Band: Unplugged. Finally, we took a straw poll to determine whether the average gamer really is 35, overweight and depressed, and then investigated whether Bejeweled could fight that depression, saw the bloodbath that is Diablo III's new monk class, and took a trip into The Dark Spire -- a ten-dollar DS dungeon-crawler that you might have missed.

A rainbow sculptured by hand from 5,000 Pantone color chips, glued onto wood boards. (via Chuck Anderson)

Oh, this is a nice thing to start the week with. TIME very kindly named Boing Boing (and by extension, Boing Boing Gadgets, Offworld, and Boing Boing Video) #8 in their "50 Best Websites of 2009" list.

There's also an accompanying video (for which embedding is disabled, oddly), in which you are advised to "visit Boing Boing every single day." We concur! Thank you, TIME editors.

* Boing Boing: 50 Best Websites 2009
* View the complete list
* TIME video: 50 Best Websites: 5 You May Not Know

Last year's Blizzcon was tremendously popular. So much so that their servers were unable to handle the strain of fans competing for 15,000 available tickets. This year, Blizzard was more prepared; they made an additional 5,000 tickets available and set up a queue so that the transaction servers weren't overwhelmed. CEO Mike Morhaime said during the keynote address that if you weren't able to get into the queue within 30 seconds of its opening, the tickets were sold out before your turn came. Tens of thousands more chose to order the pay-per-view coverage, demonstrating the extraordinary enthusiasm felt for Blizzard's games. Their presentations didn't disappoint. Read on for details on the status of StarCraft II, Diablo III, World of Warcraft: Cataclysm, and the new Battle.net. It's divided into sections by game in case you're only interested in one or two of them.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

From the Fall 2009 Goatse collection. (wouldbuyagain, via @seanbonner)

Bill Gurstelle is your MAKEcation counselor for the make-a-trebuchet Family Challenge. Build a trebuchet and post pictures tagged "MAKEcation" in the MAKE Flickr pool to enter to win a $100 Maker Shed gift certificate!

More in my series of posts on How to Build a Catapult. In this post, I discuss Catapults, Ballistas, Trebuchets and the Triggers, Releases, and Latches that operate them.

I receive quite a few inquiries about making catapults and trebuchets. And among the most frequent questions is: how do I build the trigger? It's an important question.

Catapults are fun and educational to build and operate. When building a catapult, trebuchet, ballista, mangonel, or any of the hundred names by which such hurling machines are known, you'll find out that the mechanism that releases the throwing arm is often the most complicated part of the machine.

You may build your own release, which is tricky because you need to design the latch so that it will release reliably under full load. Actually, you can get pretty creative about triggers.

But considering how cheap and easy it is to buy one, it might make more sense to use one of the commercial solutions below, and spend your time working on the other aspects of the machine.I've spent time researching the best triggers and releases for small catapults. There are three good, off-the-shelf solutions: The archer's arrow release, the sailor's pelican hook, and the horse trainer's panic snap.

Archer's Arrow Release:

This is the premier solution. Works dependably, quickly and very smoothly. It costs a bit more, but of all the catapult releases I've tried, I like this one the best. Find it at a sporting goods store with an archery department, or find it online.

Sailor's Pelican Hook:

This is another excellent hurling machine trigger. Its normal use is in sailing, where it is used to securely hold and release lines and ropes. Basically a pelican hook is a hinged hook that can be quickly secured or released by a sliding ring. It is quite a bit less expensive than an arrow release, but it holds securely under load. The downside is that they can be awkward to release sometimes. Find it at a boating store or online.

Horse Trainer's Panic Snap:

A panic snap is a mechanism often used between a lead and a horse's harness. They are decent catapult triggers because they can be disconnected under load. A panic snap is specially built so that the latching mechanism is separate from the load bearing structure. Just pull back on the latch and the load releases. Very inexpensive, but not as smooth or dependable as the arrow release. Find it at a tack shop or online.

More:

• MAKEcations: deadline extended!
• Maker Workshop - Portable Trebuchet on Make: television
  
• MAKEcation trebuchet bundle in the Maker Shed
  

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One of the things that many conferences are struggling with these days is the question of how do you handle "press passes" for events. In the past, it was easy: there was press... and there was everyone else. But these days, when anyone can become a publisher of their own blog or other site, where do you draw the line? I know I've had discussions with conference organizers who fret over the issue, and generally decide on a rather ad hoc basis. But Glurbie alerts us to a story that takes the issue to an entirely different level. If you're a blogger... and you get a "press pass" to an industry (or competitor's) event as a blogger, rather than as an employee of your company, at what point is there an ethical lapse?

In this story, a spokesperson for Boeing, who also writes for a defense contractor blog, went to an industry event under a press pass for the blog, rather than being listed as a Boeing employee -- and then sat in on various presentations by competitors. That second link notes that this probably falls short of real corporate espionage (which the original link above raises), but does certainly raise some ethical questions. There is a suggestion that most people in the room probably already knew the guy worked for Boeing, but it still seems odd not to admit that fact.

While there's some effort to pose this story as a question about "blogging" (and Boeing is apparently reviewing its blogging efforts and thinking of shutting down the guy's blog), I'm really not sure it's a "blogging" issue at all. The real issue is one of disclosure. The guy didn't disclose who he worked for when that could have been rather relevant.

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brumgrunt writes "Den Of Geek wonders if James Cameron's Avatar is heading for a fall, and if it will even be a science fiction film, off the back of the previews shown last week. It writes: "It seems in Avatar that all this gee-whiz science is merely there to draw the 'old crowd' in and provide some kind of rationale for a brightly-coloured fantasy-world which reflects the most emetic of the artwork plastered over teenage girls' MySpace pages"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Launched just moments ago, Typedia is a "shared encylopedia of typefaces", created by Jason Santa Maria and a super team of smart folks. Congrats to all involved. It's going to be one excellent resource. More about the launch on Jason's blog. #

andylim writes "Today Nokia unveiled its first netbook that runs Windows and packs an Intel Atom processor. The Nokia Booklet 3G is the first Nokia device to feature a full-sized keypad and a 10-inch display. Recombu.com has listed the specs, which include an SD card reader, Bluetooth, GPS, 3G, HSDPA (3.5G), Wi-Fi, an HDMI port for HD video out and a front facing camera for video calling. According to Nokia the Booklet will provide 12 hours of battery life."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Remember a few weeks back when a Washington Post reporter claimed that Gawker was "ripping off" his reporting, despite the fact that the Gawker piece linked back to the original article three times? Since then, we've noted how common it is for the mainstream press to do much worse to bloggers, quite often giving them no credit at all and pretending they came up with the stories entirely on their own.

Well, here we go again...

If you're a reader of Reason, you're probably well aware of the massive amount of work that writer Radley Balko has put into investigating Steven Hayne, a controversial Mississippi medical examiner, whose testimony and autopsy practices were called into serious question by Balko's research and reporting. Balko has spent years exposing Hayne (and some of his colleagues) for practices that, if true, are abhorrent. Balko's investigative research and reporting has been instrumental in overturning questionable verdicts. If you're looking into Steven Hayne, there's simply no way you can avoid Balko's reporting and research on the subject.

And, it appears that CNN didn't avoid Balko's research and reporting either, in its own reporting on Hayne, as a part of Anderson Cooper 360. Much of what was done by CNN appears to have come straight from Balko's research -- and sources quoted by CNN told Balko that CNN claims it found them via his articles. But, does CNN credit Balko for any of it? Nope. Not at all.

Because, you see, it's only "ripping off" when it's the "alternative media" properly citing the mainstream press... not when the mainstream press doesn't credit the alternative media at all.

As Tim Lee notes, there's nothing wrong with what CNN did, but it does show how silly it is to claim that it's these other sites or "parasitic aggregators" that "rip off" the mainstream press, when the mainstream media has been doing the same thing for ages -- and continues to do it without any qualms whatsoever. Tim notes:

Now this isn't illegal. Nor should it be. But it is rather unprofessional. And I think it's a good illustration of what's wrong with the standard story about large media organizations producing the news and blogs cutting and pasting. Not only does the sharing goes in both directions, but I think people have a skewed perception of which direction is more common precisely because blogs do a better job of crediting their sources. When Gawker builds on a Washington Post story, they don't try to pretend it was original reporting; they give credit, provide a link, and they'll often just quote the original story rather than re-interviewing all the same sources. So it's obvious who's copying whom. In contrast, when a mainstream media outlet like CNN decides to build on the reporting of an online source, they do a lot of extra (and possibly unnecessary) work to avoid giving credit. One consequence is that only in really blatant cases (like this one) does anyone catch them.

There's a clear double standard here. If it's wrong for a blogger to build a story on a mainstream media story with attribution and a link, it's even more wrong for a mainstream media outlet to build on a blogger's story without a word of credit. CNN owes Radley a prominent link to his past work. And an apology.

Indeed. But whereas the story from the Washington Post reporter kicked up a huge discussion on ethics of reporting, who wants to bet that this one dies a quiet death without the mainstream media mentioning it at all?

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Although it isn't finished yet, this homebrew cutoff saw project by Lionel Oliver, Jr. of backyard metalcasting puts my jaw on the floor. Maybe if we send a little link-love his way he'll get inspired to finish it up.

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Pieroxy writes "Theiphoneblog carries a nice article on the reason Apple rejected the Google Voice application even though it doesn't violate any terms and services. The article goes in depth over the issue of controlling the hardware (Apple) vs controlling the software (Google & Apple so far) and how Apple doesn't want Google to take over a critical part of its phone. Just like Google is going into the OS business to make sure it gets never cut out, Apple is also building a huge datacenter to — they guess — take over some online cloud computing business of their own and be less dependent on Google for these services."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Many statistics examples start with "assuming a fair coin-toss..." But it turns out that coin-tosses aren't fair; depending on your toss, there's a small-to-alarming bias in the result.

1. If the coin is tossed and caught, it has about a 51% chance of landing on the same face it was launched. (If it starts out as heads, there's a 51% chance it will end as heads).

2. If the coin is spun, rather than tossed, it can have a much-larger-than-50% chance of ending with the heavier side down. Spun coins can exhibit "huge bias" (some spun coins will fall tails-up 80% of the time).

3. If the coin is tossed and allowed to clatter to the floor, this probably adds randomness.

4. If the coin is tossed and allowed to clatter to the floor where it spins, as will sometimes happen, the above spinning bias probably comes into play...

The Coin Flip: A Fundamentally Unfair Proposition? (via Schneier)

From the MAKE Flickr pool

Not quite sure how it sounds, but Matt's SpringBox reverb sports a sweet case design that'll look just right alongside his mini CV controller. The box uses an Acutronics spring tank + a collection of modded amp kits to do its thing - more detail on Flickr.

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Here's a HOWTO for building your own electrocardiograph -- many such plans exist, but this one lowers the cost and part-count by ingeniously repurposing the sound-card from a PC.

Digitization: Once amplified, the ECG signal along with a bunch of noise is in analog form. You could display the output with an oscilloscope, but to load it into your PC you need an analog-to-digital converter. Don't worry! If you've got a sound card with a microphone input, you've already got one! It's just that easy. We'll simply wire the output of our ECG circuit to the input of our sound card, record the output of the op-amp using standard sound recording software, remove the noise from the ECG digitally, and output gorgeous ECG traces ready for visualization and analysis!

DIY ECG Machine On The Cheap (via Make)

Michael Erard's "A Short Manifesto on the Future of Attention" reiterates Herbert Simon's 1971 prediction of an attention shortage: "What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients," and asks what an attention economy would really look like. Apart from some extremely dubious Ronald Reagan worship, the article is a fascinating read.

I imagine attention festivals: week-long multimedia, cross-industry carnivals of readings, installations, and performances, where you go from a tent with 30-second films, guitar solos, 10-minute video games, and haiku to the tent with only Andy Warhol movies, to a myriad of venues with other media forms and activities requiring other attention lengths. In the Nano Tent, you can hear ringtones and read tweets. A festival organized not by the forms of the commodities themselves but of the experience of interacting with them. Not organized by time elapsed, but by cognitive investment: a pop song, which goes by quickly, can resonate for days; a poem, which can go by more quickly, sticks through a season. A festival in which you can see images of your brain on knitting and on Twitter.

I imagine a retail sector for cultural products that's organized around the attention span: not around "books" or "music" but around short stories and pop songs in one aisle, poems and arias in the other. In the long store: 5,000 piece jigsaw puzzles, big novels, beer brewing equipment, DVDs of The Wire. Clerks could suggest and build attentional menus. We would develop attentional connoisseurship: the right pairings of the short and long. We would understand, and promote, attentional health.

A Short Manifesto on the Future of Attention (via Futurismic)

Xemu writes "Global Gaming Factory X (GGF), the company that plans to purchase Swedish file-sharing site The Pirate Bay, has encountered an additional setback. Last week trading in GGF stock were suspended due to suspected insider trading. On Friday, Magnus Bergman, GGF chairman, submitted his resignation to the Swedish Companies Registration Office. Bergman's resignation is the latest in a series after the previous departures of board member Johan Sällström and adviser Wayne Rosso. The CEO of GGF, Hans Pandeya, is being pursued by the Swedish enforcement service for mounting unpaid debts. In an interview with the Swedish business daily 'di.se' today, CEO Hans Pandeya says that the deal is still on."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Journalist and writer Rick Poynor confronts his old, abandoned typewriter and appreciates it:

Examining my Olympia again, I'm struck by how powerfully its form and image embody and express the idea of writing, as does almost any typewriter. Like the telephone at an earlier phase in its development when it still had a distinct earpiece and mouthpiece at either end of a handle, the fully evolved typewriter is a 20th-century industrial archetype. It feels inevitable, almost elemental, like one of those object types, such as a chair or a fork, that simply had to exist in this universe of forms. Even now (but for how much longer?) a typewriter is the icon to show if you want to convey the idea of a dedicated literary life. The title page of The Rough Guide to Cult Fiction -- just out -- shows a portable typewriter on a desk with other writing paraphernalia. Turn the page and the caption reads "The essential equipment of a cult author, as collected by William Burroughs." Burroughs receives the longest entry in the book. The ultimate cult author -- the ultimate writing machine.

In Memoriam: My Manual Typewriter (via Beyond the Beyond)

Brianna Wu's latest art project is the cover art for the magazine "Crossed Genres." Frank Wu explains, "Brianna went to University of Mississippi, where a famous race riot took place - thus the building is the Lyceum, where you can still see the bullet holes in the columns. As one of the lone liberals on campus, Bri wanted to do her own comentary on it. So... we see Martin Luther King hit with a rocket, but it's ok - because he's a Terminator. And we also see KKK members, but they're all sexy ninja girls in skimpy white outfits, and now that MLK is free at last from his fleshy shell, he's going to kick their butts. Sixties girls in go-go boots and jetpacks fight alongside."

Crossed Genres cover art (Thanks, Frank!)

Evil Mad Scientist Labs outdoes itself with a project to induce gigantism in plant-life using Gibberellic acid, which induces "frankly absurd growth" in many plants.

For the control sample (marked Kontrol) we soaked one tablespoon of washed and sorted beans in water for twelve to eighteen hours. We then rinsed the beans and poured off the excess water twice a day. For the experimental sample (marked Kaos) we did the initial soak in our 100 ppm Gibberellic acid solution. Twice a day we rinsed, first in water which was drained off, then in the Gibberellic acid solution, pouring off the excess. Both jars were capped with cheesecloth and stored in a dark cabinet when not being rinsed or photographed...

On day five, the experimental sprouts are definitely trying to escape. Sprouts are normally eaten on the fourth or fifth day, but we don't recommend eating the sprouts treated with Gibberellic acid (see MSDS).

Mad Science 101: Inducing giantism in living organisms

From the incomparable nerd-toon XKCD, the "Tech Support Cheat Sheet" -- a print-and-save for the techno-clueless to keep by their monitors.

Tech Support Cheat Sheet

@Halvais, a fan of my novel Little Brother, has set up a wiki-style site with the full text of the book for group annotation with links and commentary. Sweet!

W1N5T0N

Pete alerts us to the news that the band Lotus is trying out a pay what you want tour. They apparently worked out a deal with Ticketweb to basically let people pick prices anywhere from $1 to $20 (no $0 option). They've also tried to put an incentive in place to pay more: if you spend more than $15, you get free downloads from the band. It's another interesting model, though I'm not sure it makes as much sense as some other models. Again, concert tickets are a scarce good, and doing pay what you want on a scarce good is a lot riskier. Still, it's yet another experiment that'll be interesting to follow. I think I like K-OS's experiment with letting people pay what they want on the way out of a concert better. Still, experiments are good, so it's nice to see another one.

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JumperCable writes "The NY Daily News is reporting that model Liskula Cohen, who was suing the 'Skanks of NYC' blogger for defamation, is dropping the lawsuit now that she has outed the anonymous blogger, who is a Fashion Institute of Technology student named Rosemary Port. This brings up the question of potential abuse of the legal system to 'out' anonymous authors even if there is no intention actually to pursue a case against an anonymous individual. Also, according to the article, the outed blogger intends to sue Google for $15 million because it 'breached its fiduciary duty to protect her expectation of anonymity.' Do Web hosting services even have a fiduciary duty to protect their clients, or is this all legal bluff and bluster?" Should such anonymity-busting court rulings include a provision for penalties if the plaintiff does not follow through with legal action after outing their target?

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

While exploring the minimalist limits of what constitutes a 'drum machine', Eric Archer built these pared down percussion circuits with built in sequencers. The boards use only 2 chips (opamp + CD4089) and synch with eachother over infrared - quite simply, awesome. Read more about them on Eric's blog.

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Maker Scott Harden built a ultra-low-cost ECG machine using the sound card on his PC, some free digital audio processing software, a simple circuit, and a few pennies.

Although several DIY ECG guides exist on the internet, this one focuses on minimizing the part count and cost by performing noise reduction (normally handled by complicated analog circuitry) digitally with your computer. The device hooks up to your chest (using pennies as electrodes) and outputs to the microphone jack of your computer sound card so it can be recorded with free audio software. In addition to a description of how to build and use the DIY ECG, this guide also provides the code needed to perform complicated long-term heart rate and heart rate variability analysis to assess neurological control over cardiac function!

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Impressive vision system on this bot'

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have given Honda's humanoid robot, ASIMO, the ability to walk towards a goal position while avoiding stationary and moving obstacles...

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As mentioned over the weekend, we were briefly hacked on Saturday evening. We've put in a bit of time to figure out what happened, clean up the mess and correct the problems (and harden some other defenses as well). The short story is that we left open a big hole that we shouldn't have left open. Yay. We had certainly locked down most of the obvious holes, and people try to hack us on a semi-regular basis, with little success. But, if someone's persistent enough, they'll find a way. In this case, though, we made it a hell of a lot easier than we should have. This particular hacker tried hitting a whole bunch of different routes early Saturday morning, most of which got rejected (some people noticed his attempt to do a SQL injection via the comments -- that failed). However, he went on to try SQL injections just about everywhere and eventually found one where we hadn't properly escaped things, and bam, that's all it takes. As you probably know, this site has been around since 1998, and while we've dumped/updated most of the old code, and most of the new code is properly secured, there were still a little pieces left over from the ancient code -- and that's where the big vulnerabilities were. That's not an excuse. We should have caught it earlier (in fact, we actually had been testing some code to replace some of the vulnerabilities, but hadn't deployed it yet -- but, we now realize it wouldn't have blocked all the problems). But, it is what happened.

From there, the hacker got into part of the blog admin (don't want to get into too many details of how the blog backend works, but it actually involves two separate admins -- which are separate from other stuff we do). Then, he basically had pretty good access to doing some stuff (though not everything) on the blog. He poked around a bit, deleted a bunch of comments, deleted a whole ton of old story submissions (most of which were junk anyway -- so thanks!) and then replaced a few stories on the front page with his fancy "hacked!" claims.

After that, the story is pretty straightforward. Once we realized what happened, we put the old stories back in place and made sure to quickly toss up some more secure walls to keep him out of the admin. We also shut down comments and submissions for a while, even though we were pretty damn sure the vulnerability wasn't there (it wasn't), but we wanted to make sure. Then a few of us spent some time digging around to understand just what the guy did so we could retrace his steps and make sure we killed off the basic vulnerabilities. Considering that he tried to hit us from a bunch of different angles, this took a bit longer than expected. But, once we figured out the basics, it was just a matter of tracking down the actual holes in the code. It was a little frustrating, since we really thought we'd blocked out SQL injections -- but in the end, it turns out we didn't do it absolutely everywhere. Anyway, there's a fair amount of code to go through, so we've been going over it with a fine-tooth comb, and checking it twice, then locking it down again.

Finally, we've been restoring the lost comments (we're doing that right now, so they might not all be back yet), of which we believe we didn't lose any (there's a small chance that a very very small number of comments were lost). Restoring the lost submissions is a bit much at this point (as I said, most were junk anyway), so if you submitted stories late Friday or Saturday, and really think we should see them, perhaps submit them again.

On the whole, there's not that much to say, other than check your code carefully, folks. If there's a hole somewhere, eventually someone's gonna find it. Luckily, this guy didn't do much damage -- just a bit of vandalism -- and he kept a few of us from enjoying what had otherwise been quite nice weekends with our friends and families. But he got us to go over our code pretty carefully (and mentally kick ourselves a few times), and get in touch with our inner CSI detectives to track down exactly what happened.

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Looking for something portable and not satisfied with jailbreaking, or paying a metered fee, maker Adam Byers decided to build this interface box to record calls made on his iPhone.

[via @adambyers]

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A couple of weeks back the Wall Street Journal reported on the first organ grown in vivo from stem cells — a tooth in the mouth of a mouse. Reader cdrpsab spotted the news on the MedGadget blog; the research had been reported earlier in the PNAS. From the WSJ: "The researchers at the Tokyo University of Science created a set of cells that contained genetic instructions to build a tooth, and then implanted this 'tooth germ' into the mouse's empty tooth socket. The tooth grew out of the socket and through the gums, as a natural tooth would. Once the engineered tooth matured, after 11 weeks, it had a similar shape, hardness and response to pain or stress as a natural tooth, and worked equally well for chewing. The researchers suggested that using similar techniques in humans could restore function to patients with organ failure."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Cheap, Fat & Open is an Arduino based synth that allows for additional sensors to be added via the stylophone cable. via - Arduino.cc

using mini-jack cables as stylophone sensors turned out to be a clever move: the cables carry 3 signals, allowing me to run 5V and GND through the cable along with the sensor signal. this opens up for modular plug and play with home built sensors, that get powered by the platform.

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An anonymous reader tips a blog posting that begins "A few blogs are passing around videos of the Ishikawa Komuro Lab's high-speed robot hand performing impressive acts of dexterity and skillful manipulation. However, the video being passed around is slight on details. Meanwhile, their video presentation at ICRA 2009 (which took place in May in Kobe, Japan) has an informative narration and demonstrates additional capabilities. ... [It] shows the manipulator dribbling a ping-pong ball, spinning a pen, throwing a ball, tying knots, grasping a grain of rice with tweezers, and tossing / re-grasping a cellphone!"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Silicon Alley Insider has an interesting piece about Yahoo's obsession with all-things-Twitter. And at the end they have an even more interesting strategy. "Yahoo should work to be a better place to use Twitter than Twitter.com."

This sounds a lot like the winning strategy Yahoo used to best CNN and MSNBC in web news in the 2004 timeframe. With My Yahoo they became the place to go to find out what's new on CNN and MSNBC, and of course on Yahoo.

This kind of embrace is a perfect prelude to competing with Twitter. First, develop a base of people who use Yahoo as their interface for Twitter, and then gradually add features that only work Yahoo-to-Yahoo.

Twitter could add those features too of course, but they might not, since they believe (incorrectly, imho) that the 140 character limit and URL-shortening are part of the magic of Twitter.

Yahoo, or anyone else who adopted this approach, could capture the users who would like to have a bit more space to express their ideas.

My friend Cara just introduced me to the work of Japanese photographer and aquarist Takashi Amano. From his Wikipedia entry:

Takashi Amano is one of the most influential people in the freshwater aquascaping community. He can largely be credited with introducing Japanese gardening concepts such as Wabi-sabi and Zen rock arrangement to the aquascaping hobby. His tank compositions involve intricate, and typically asymmetrical (though balanced) arrangements of aquatic plants often augmented by river rocks and driftwood. His aquascapes are notable in that they often mimic nature in their appearance, and can be regarded as a form of art.

Besides his personal site, linked above, Mr. Amano also runs Aqua Design Amano, which specializes in high-end aquascaping equipment and supplies.

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DesiVideoGamer writes "John Carmack, the lead developer for id's Tech 5 graphics engine, does not plan on making a Linux port for the new engine. From his e-mail: 'It isn't out of the question, but I don't think we will be able to justify the work. If there are hundreds of thousands of Linux users playing Quake Live when we are done with Rage, that would certainly influence our decision.' One of the reasons for not making a Linux port was due to the fact that the new engine 'pushes a lot of paths that are not usually optimized' and that the Linux port would have to use the binary blob graphics driver in order to work."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

theodp writes "The jury's still out on whether Chicago taxpayers were taken to the cleaners by a rushed 75-year lease of the city's metered parking to a Morgan Stanley consortium. But most would probably agree that the new shared Pay Boxes that replaced the city's old parking meters don't exactly live up to their 'Smart' billing. Here's what the redesigned 'user-friendly' parking solution looks like: 1. Park your car. 2. Walk up to 1/2 block to a Pay Box. 3. Wait in line to use it. 4. Use coins or credit cards to purchase parking time — up to $84 for 24-hours (add $50 if you run out of time). 5. Wait for a paper receipt to be printed. 6. Walk up to 1/2 block back to your car. 7. Place the receipt on your dashboard. 8. Head off to your destination, perhaps passing the Pay Box a second time. So before other cities suffer the same fate as Chicago, Portland, and others, is there a 'smarter' way? Some suggest the ParkMagic In-Car Meter, but no new orders are being taken in Chicago. Any other ideas?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

First courage...

Arthur Frommer, the famous travel writer, writes on his blog. "I will not personally travel in a state where civilians carry loaded weapons onto the sidewalks and as a means of political protest." He's talking about the event where people openly carrying guns, one carrying an assault rifle, gathered outside an event where the President spoke.

Arizona can say that people have the right to openly carry guns of any kind at any time, and we can choose not to spend time or money in such a backward place. Perfectly appropriate way to react to an obvious attempt to scare people.

Now cowardice.

Last week I wrote about how Republican Senator Charles Grassley from Iowa, one of a very small number of Republicans who, imho, was honorable -- took the coward's route and threw grandma under the bus, doing his part to confuse the electorate on the issues in the health care decision we will soon make. Paul Krugman follows up, now Grassley has the gall to blame first President Obama and then one of his constituents for his cowardly deception. He's 75 years old. Is winning another election so important that he wants to be remembered as a dishonorable liar and coward?

In all the debates about health care reform, the real issue isn't getting talked about. It's about the people who don't have coverage. Some of the easiest cases are people who have the money to buy insurance, and would buy it, if the industry would sell it to them. But they only want to insure healthy people. So we're in the ridiculous situation here where the people who most need care can't get it. Someone should tell Grassley that some of those people are our grandmothers, and grandsons and granddaughters. Nieces and nephews and mothers and fathers. Don't go claiming the compassionate high ground, when you're selling us out. Shame. (And it could be that some of his own family are screwed by the insurance industry. If not, why not?)

Of course there are the cases where people pay premiums for years, then get sick, and the company denies coverage, disputing information on their application, or claiming a pre-existing condition, long after accepting the premiums. What recourse do we have? We can sue the companies, but that takes huge money, money they have and we don't. And what difference will it make if by the time the case is decided the patient is dead? The whole idea of pre-existing conditions is one that we need to get rid of, completely. Everyone who wants insurance must be able to buy it. Period. No exceptions.

Because these problems concern millions of Americans, everyone knows someone who has been put through the ringer by the insurance process. These stories about angry people (what are they angry about exactly and what does it have to do with health care) are drowning out the tragic stories of people who die because they aren't covered.

One more pointer.

The Democrats aren't blameless because they aren't selling health care reform.

George Lakoff explains how it must be done. Not with lengthy explanations of policy, but with stories that fit into the experiences of all of us, and connecting the values of universal health care with what it means to be an American.

The Raëlians, a religious cult that basically gets you in the door with promises of free sex, then brainwashes you with a bunch of garbage about UFOs and cloning and giving all your money to the church, hosted a "topless rights" parade in Venice Beach today. Here's a short video snapshot I shot on my trusty iContraption. The parade was kind of a letdown, I was expecting more space aliens, or at least something with better art direction, like their Star Wars knockoffs. The premise of the march had something to do with the 14th amendment, and acceptance of the female body as a sacred vehicle for extraterrestrial meat-worship.

Moobs were displayed. Signs were carried. Some women paraded around with nipple-shaped pasties on. That's about it. Just another day in Venice.

Video snapshot: Raëlian Topless Alien Sex March, Venice (Warning: shows some dudes wearing bras, and some women walking around showing off their bewbs)

More: gotopless.org, rael.org. (Thanks for the heads up, Sean Bonner)