Last week, in the comments on our post about a story in The Onion fooling newspapers in Bangladesh, a commenter named Esteban pointed out that down in Argentina, news reporters recently did a typical moral panic-style piece about teens drinking an alcoholic concoction called Grog XD with the ingredients: "kerosene, propylene glycol, artificial sweeteners, sulphuric acid, rum, acetone, red dye no. 2, scumm, axle grease, battery acid, and/or pepperoni." The source of the story? An ingredients list found on Facebook. Apparently, the reporters were unfamiliar with The Secret of Monkey Island -- the popular game from which the recipe was taken, but thankfully some folks have put together a nice video comparing the two:

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snydeq writes "Performance and metrics researcher Devil Mountain Software has released an array of real-world Windows use data as compiled by its exo.performance.network, a community-based monitoring tool that receives real-time data from about 10,000 PCs throughout the world. Tracking users specific configurations, as well as the applications they actually use, the tool provides insights into real-world Windows use, including browser share, multicore adoption, service pack adoption, and which anti-virus, productivity, and media software users are most prevalent among Windows users. Of note is the fact that, two years after Vista's release, not even 30 percent of PCs actually run it, that OpenOffice.org is making inroads into the Microsoft Office user base, and that, despite the rise of Firefox, Internet Explorer remains the standard option for inside-the-firewall apps."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Phil Jones and I agree on how bootstraps work.

He wrote a beautiful piece in 2006, and just re-ran it with links to 2009 bits that illustrate his points.

It's a case study in how Internet bootstraps work. They're about 10 percent technology and 90 percent working with people, trying to figure out what they want and getting it for them. In the process something builds out that has a cohesive whole, and another layer is formed.

A few years go by and we do it again.

I'm certainly not the only person who understands this process, I'm a student, and I've learned from many others that come before. I love reading books about how this works, and the latest inspiration was the Connections series by James Burke. He goes all the way back to the beginning of civilization and shows how ideas interconnect and build on other ideas.

In the end it really is all about working together. And I'm glad that Phil is there. It's nice to have someone watching who sees how it all fits together.

Then, this evening, a really insightful Webmonkey piece came out. It's the same insight that William Mougayar had, in a comment here yesterday. When this bootstrap plays out it will all be seen to have happened at the workstation. What Matt and Wordpress did over the weekend was the nuclear fuel that lit the fire. But the big winners will be the readers, skimmers and Twitter clients that will, as Webmonkey puts it so well: "We'll just have to stop calling them Twitter clients and start calling them what they should be referred to as: news clients." Amen.

WALL OF FLUFF.

Because dude, this was harsh. And this was cute but not sufficiently cute. It's okay, you guys, Xeni's here now. Boing Boing moderator Antinous points us to this, and says, "I recommend dropping acid and hitting them all simultaneously." (via Teresa Nielsen Hayden)

TuringTest writes "According to OStatic, European company TomTom (which recently settled a patent agreement with Microsoft) has announced a new open source format OpenLR for sharing routing data (relevant points, traffic information...) in digital maps of different vendors, to be used in GPS devices. The LR stands for Location Referencing. They aim is to push it as an open standard to build a cooperative information base, presumably to operate in a similar fashion as its current TomTom Map Share technology, in which end users provide map corrections on the fly. The technology to support the format will be released as GPLv2. Does that make OpenLR a GPL GPS?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

TuringTest writes "According to OStatic, European company TomTom (which recently settled a patent agreement with Microsoft) has announced a new open source format OpenLR for sharing routing data (relevant points, traffic information...) in digital maps of different vendors, to be used in GPS devices. The LR stands for Location Referencing. They aim is to push it as an open standard to build a cooperative information base, presumably in a similar way than its current TomTom Map Share technology in which end users provide map corrections on the fly. The technology to support the format will be released as GPLv2. Does it make OpenLR a GPL GPS?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Back in college, I took a lot of statistics classes -- and I did pretty well in them, but it wasn't until I was well into a pretty high level stats class that I finally started to understand statistics, and it had nothing to do with the class or the teacher. It had to do with the job I'd taken as a stats tutor for six different intro stats classes (and, eventually, that resulted in teaching a full class on stats to incoming freshmen). What I realized is that as useful as the book learning and problem sets and everything was, it wasn't until I had to actually explain something back to someone who really didn't understand it, that I finally started to really understand the more important aspects of statistics. I couldn't get away with "well, I understand this because it works." I had to so fully understand statistics that I could actually understand questions that came from way out in left field, and try to figure out how to fit them back into the framework that was being taught. It was a valuable lesson.

In talking about the future of journalism, one point I've made repeatedly, is that news organizations need to realize that their community is their best asset, and they need to cater to them more and involve them a lot more in the process. Today's news "consumer" isn't really a consumer, but a participant. I've talked about how they want to share the news, write the news and comment on the news, but what about actually experiencing the news in some manner?

Whether on purpose or not, it seems like that's what Wired just accomplished with its ambitious Vanish project. If you haven't paid attention to it, it started with an article last month in Wired, called Gone Forever: What Does It Take to Really Disappear?, written by reporter Evan Ratliff. The article itself was quite an enjoyable read, about people who have simply tried to disappear and start a new life (and the difficulty of actually vanishing from your old life). Despite the topic (and the fact that I love such stories), I probably would have skipped the article over. There's only so much time and so many things you can read in a daily basis -- and (as you might have guessed) I already read a lot.

But, Wired combined this with a contest. The reporter on the story, Evan Ratliff agreed to "vanish" himself for a month, and the contest was to see if anyone could find him. If someone found him and said the word "fluke" to him, Evan would respond with a codeword that would allow the "winner" to alert Wired's Nicholas Thompson and claim a $5,000 prize (including, I believe, Ratliff's own $3,000 for writing the article). That certainly made the story a lot more compelling. I have to admit that I didn't participate much in the "chase" which was tracked in a variety of places online from Facebook to Twitter to the Vanish blog on Wired, which dropped clues and tied together some of the findings.

On Tuesday, however, Ratliff was caught, down in New Orleans, by the operator of a pizza shop, who had been alerted to the whole thing just a day before by someone who had been very closely tracking Ratliff, and used some rather creative means to track him down -- including befriending some people who were alerted to Evan's whereabouts without even realizing it. You can read the full explanation from Jeff Reifman as to how he tracked down Ratliff, or Wired's shorter summary of the story. In the end, Ratliff left a lot of clues, but he did so purposely, to help illustrate typical mistakes made by those who do try to "vanish" for real.

However, what struck me, was just how involved the community got in this story. It reminded me of the revelation of learning statistics by teaching it -- and has me thinking more about "experiential" reporting on "reporting by game" to better involve a community in various projects. I am not suggesting that "this is the future of journalism." But I am saying it may be one potentially useful way that some stories could be told. For many people involved in this project, I'll bet they learned a hell of a lot more about this issue than they ever expected. And even those of use who were "casual observers" picked up a ton of interesting knowledge about how people try to vanish -- and (perhaps much more interesting) how others track them down. If I were looking to make journalism more interesting, I'd start looking at ways to more creatively involve a community, and Wired's Vanish experiment is one to keep in mind as an example.

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Here's a unicorn chaser to follow the botfly infestation video post. My daughter made this for me out of paper mache, and it sits on a dresser in my office. (Click images to enlarge.)

This morning in San Francisco, I covered the Apple announcement for Boing Boing Gadgets. The highlights: Steve Jobs made a surprise comeback, iTunes got a makeover, the iPhone has a new OS, iPods got cheaper and slightly fancier, and Norah Jones sang from her upcoming album.

Details here:
Jobs returns to announce new iTunes, iPhone OS, and Nano with video

Also:
BBG's live-Tweeting the Apple event today
It's only rock and roll with Norah Jones
Three new App store games worth checking out
Photos of Steve Jobs and his new Nano

Instructables user Housekey posted this awesome tutorial on replacing the lenses in a classic Land camera with pinhole optics. Instant pinhole photos!

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Hynee writes "As tweeted, NASA has released 10 new images, all from the new WFC3 instrument and others, including the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph. Images include NGC 6302, Carina Nebula, Stephan's Quintet, Markarian 817, Abell 370, and a few others. Great looking stuff, the WFC3 has twice the resolution of the WF/PC2, on the CCD at least, if memory serves correctly. Eta Carina is a fascinating object, and there are at least two releases in this 'Early Release Observations' set." Here is a video about the new images at Hubblesite.org, and a full HubbleSite.org release page with 56 images.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

CG was the first of a bunch of folks who sent in a link to Dr. Ben Goldacre from the always excellent Bad Science blog taking on the issue of the harm done by pharma patents:

Ignoring patent and licensing issues has allowed Dr Yusuf Hamied, director of Cipla, to innovate: even though each drug is officially owned by a different company, he could put a common combination of three treatments (Stavudine, Lamivudine and Nevirapine) into one simple, single combination pill. This increases treatment compliance -- it's easier to take your medication correctly -- and that keeps you alive longer, while reducing the emergence of resistant strains.

Hamied calls his pill Triomune (he also offers "Antiflu", a copy of Tamiflu for the developing world, and many more). In 2001 he was selling to MSF clinics for $350 per person per year, more than 30 times cheaper than the official versions of these drugs. Triomune is now only $87 a year. This is amazing. Hamied is a hero.

Richard Sykes, head of GlaxoSmithKline (and now retired rector of Imperial College London) disagreed. He called Hamied a "pirate" and described the quality of Indian generic drugs as "iffy". Hamied says GSK is a "global serial killer" for charging high prices for their medication. So who is right?

From there, Goldacre runs through the traditional arguments both in favor of and against pharma patents, and concludes:

If the global $550bn pharmaceutical industry are trying to make an economic case for patents in the developing world, then they must argue that the benefit to drug development from the financial incentives in these tiny corners of the world market is so significant -- so vital, the final link in the incentive chain -- that it is more important than millions of unnecessary deaths. I am not a health economist, but I doubt that is a fair swap, and this is not what patent laws were invented for.

Indeed. I'm glad to see Goldacre take on this issue, though I hope that he'll spend some time exploring the work done by many before him that goes much more deeply into the problems with pharma patents. For example, in explaining why pharma patents can be "good," Goldacre trots out the line "It takes about $800m and 10 years to bring a drug to market," but that's been widely debunked. If Goldacre (or anyone else) is interested in the subject, they should check out Merrill Goozner's detailed and thorough analysis of this claim in his book, appropriately entitled The $800 Million Pill, which thoroughly debunks the notion that it costs a pharma company $800 million to bring a pill to market.

On top of that, he should look at the some of the work done by Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz in detailing how patents harm innovation in the drug process. Or, hell, he can look to the US government itself. The GAO put out a report a few years ago, noting that patents appeared to be hindering, not helping, the development of new drugs. Another great source of detailed information is the chapter in David Levine and Michele Boldrin's book, Against Intellectual Monopoly, that directly deals with the case of pharma patents (pdf). It goes through the history of different patent laws in different countries and totally debunks the idea that patents create true incentives for pharma. There's plenty of evidence of harm, but very, very little true evidence that patents create actual incentives for innovation.

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This is a older piece, but it is new to me. Robotlab made this installation called bios, where an industrial robot reproduced the Bible on a scroll by writing it out using a pen. It used to be quite a tedious task for a human to accomplish, however it is more comical to see a robot used in this manner.

[via near future laboratory]

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An anonymous reader writes 'In the article entitled Apple vs. Microsoft — A Website Usability Study, Dmitry Fadeyev, co-founder of Pixelshell, compares Apple's and Microsoft's web sites from a usability perspective, and Apple is the winner. Scott Barnes, PM at Microsoft, agrees with him and suggests the problem is because various site sub-domains have different management.'

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

For years, the entertainment industry has pushed a propaganda line in its "education" programs that are used in schools: "if you haven't paid for it, you stole it." Of course, that's not actually true. But, if the entertainment industry wants to claim that, shouldn't it live by those rules too? Apparently, the managing director of Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN, that's currently involved in numerous lawsuits against file sharing sites, is happily talking up the fact that he now has possession of a laptop from a "hacker" and that it was confiscated from that hacker. So, clearly, BREIN didn't pay for it. Doesn't that mean it was stolen by their own definition? While the police may have the right to confiscate goods, BREIN is not the police. It's a private industry organization, that claims it's against theft, but doesn't seem to mind participating in "getting things without paying for it" when it has the chance.

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Video of a woman named Vanessa with a botfly maggot in her scalp. Vanessa got it when she went to Belize. She was planning to go to the doctor to have it removed, but she couldn't stand feeling it and hearing it crawl around under her skin, so she asked her boyfriend (or husband?) to remove it. He wasn't able to get it out (using a bottle full of smoke) so later that day she went to the doctor, but the doctor wasn't able to remove it, either. However, the doctor put a piece of tape over the hole, which cut off the maggot's air supply. Several hours after Vanessa got home, the maggot tried crawling out of the hole, and that's when her friend was able to pull it out.

Yes, it's gross, but it is also a very well made and informative short video. (via Bits & Pieces)

Al writes "Many people reveal way too much personal information on social networking sites--something that can easily lead to identity theft or unwanted attention from employers etc. Technology Review has a story about several cryptographic tools that can be used to hide your activity on Facebook, from both untrusted users and from Facebook itself. Urs Hengartner, an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Waterloo, developed a Firefox plugin that obfuscates anything marked with '@@' on Facebook and only reveals the correct information to trusted users who have the right keys. The sensitive data itself is even stored on an outside server so that even Facebook cannot access it. The piece mentions two other projects, NOYB and flybynight, that also aim to make personal information more secure on Facebook."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Al writes "Many people reveal way too much personal information on social networking sites--something that can easily lead to identity theft or unwanted attention from employers etc. Technology Review has a story about several tools cryptographic tools that can be used to hide your activity on Facebook, from both untrusted users and from Facebook itself. Urs Hengartner, an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Waterloo, developed a Firefox plugin that obfuscates anything marked with '@@' on Facebook and only reveals the correct information to trusted users who have the right keys. The sensitive data itself is even stored on an outside server so that even Facebook cannot access it. The piece mentions two other projects, NOYB and flybynight, that also aim to make personal information more secure on Facebook."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Al writes "Many people reveal way too much personal information on social networking sites--something that can easily lead to identity theft or unwanted attention from employers etc. Technology Review has a story about several tools cryptographic tools that can be used to hide your activity on Facebook, from both untrusted users and from Facebook itself. Urs Hengartner, an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Waterloo, developed a Firefox plugin that obfuscates anything marked with '@@' on Facebook and only reveals the correct information to trusted users who have the right keys. The sensitive data itself is even stored on an outside server so that even Facebook cannot access it. The piece mentions two other projects, NOYB and flybynight, that also aim to make personal information more secure on Facebook."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Today marks the 40th anniversary of Nerf, those lovable foam toys that are and have been a part of pretty much everyone's childhood. When I was growing up, Nerf meant footballs and other sports-related items, but these days the company (a subsidiary of Hasbro) is known more for its dart guns.

Predictably, tinkerers began modifying the guns for greater range and rate of fire. Case in point, Greenville, TX maker and GeekDad contributor Anton Olsen, who modified his electrically powered Nerf Vulcan to shot really fast:

I picked up a Nerf Vulcan last year soon after they went on sale, and it faithfully protected my cubicle and me for a few months. The Vulcan's reign over the office came to an abrupt end when one of our MechEs rebuilt a Nerf Rocket launcher to shoot darts with 120 psi of compressed air. Dubbed the law bringer, its reign was only briefly interrupted by my newly modified Vulcan.

Knowing that I couldn't beat his velocity or range (over 100 yards), I decided to concentrate on rate of fire. A few people were reporting 500 rpm, and I managed to hit that easily with three 9.6V batteries wired in series.

See Anton's full post on the GeekDad blog, or watch a video of the final product.

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There's a tremendous amount of opposition to Google's "settlement" with authors and publishers over its book scanning project. I'm on the record as being very much against the settlement, but for very different reasons than most people. Frankly, I think Google's book scanning project is an incredibly useful and culturally valuable project, that will help expand culture and knowledge sharing. It's a way to not just preserve culture, but to share it. I can't see how that's a bad thing. In effect it's really no different than Google's search engine in how it works. It's basically building a giant index so that people can search on it, and be pointed to the results that they want. Think of it as the most effective and useful card catalog you could ever have. Did people think the library card catalog violated book copyrights? Of course not...

So my main complaint with the "settlement" is why it's needed at all. Google had a strong fair use case in how it was running the book scanning project, and I saw no reason to cave. In caving, it's only set up plenty of other copyright battles -- with music companies, the press, video companies and more -- all demanding their share of Google's profits, for no reason other than that Google has scanned their works and points more people to it. There are, certainly, other objectionable parts to the settlement, but my main objection is the idea that it's even needed at all.

However, many others are objecting to the settlement for a series of increasingly ridiculous reasons, that make little sense. Gary Reback, the famed anti-trust lawyer who helped bring the antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft a decade ago, is working with the Open Book Alliance -- a group that most certainly has admirable goals in terms of its own book scanning project, but which is clearly complaining about the "settlement" because it will give Google a leg up over its own efforts. Reback's filing over the matter makes the claim that that the agreement represents an antitrust issue:

"Google could never have achieved through free-market competition the dominant position in digital books it seeks through the proposed settlement," reads Reback's filing. "Unwilling to compete for share in the open market, Google chose instead to use court process to achieve dominance."

Really? As Danny Sullivan points out, despite Reback's claims, Google's dominant position in the digital book market was achieved via free market competition. To claim that it couldn't have been is simply wrong. It's then flat out misleading to suggest that Google "chose to use court process to achieve dominance" because it wasn't Google that used the process. Remember, it was the Authors Guild and various publishers who sued Google.

Next up, we have the Europeans, who are complaining about the Google book settlement as well. This is hardly a surprise. After all, it's been nearly five years since officials in France declared Google's book scanning project a threat to national French culture, and then got together with other European governments to dump billions of dollars into a ill-defined "competitor" that has produced little of consequence (and, indeed, seemed to have no direction). The competitor has been so useless that the French National Library -- whose boss first raised the alarm about the book scanning project five years ago -- has thrown in the towel and signed a deal with Google to allow the company to scan its books.

So, what's their complaint? Well, it's the same old complaint, that Google's book scanning project is somehow a threat to their culture:

European officials fear that if the Google project goes ahead in the US, a yawning transatlantic gap will open up in education and research.

James Boyle unleashes his wit in response:

"Oh my God! The Americans are about to create a private workaround of the enormous mess that we regulators have made of national copyright policy! They will fix the unholy legal screwups that leave most of 20th century culture books unavailable, yet still under copyright! They will gain access to their cultural heritage -- giving them a huge competitive advantage in education. This MUST BE STOPPED!! No one can be allowed to fix this for any other country because then we would be left alone stewing in our own intellectual property stupidity! We must forbid their progress in order to protect our ignorance."

Again, the settlement deal has tons of problems, and I still can't see how it's necessary or how it helps -- but many of the complaints about it are simply ridiculous.

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whisper_jeff writes "There's been a confirmed outbreak of Swine Flu at PAX. Those who attended and are feeling under-the-weather after the con should not write it off as a typical convention cold and go see a doctor to make sure, just in case." The linked post also lists the airplane flights of the cases known so far, so if you flew from Seattle on Sunday, Monday, or Tuesday for any reason, you might want to compare your itinerary.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Here's an interesting event happening this weekend in NYC:

On September 12 and 13, 2009, during New York Fashion Week, the mainstream fashion community, the independent fashion community, and fashion's next wave of wearable technologists will convene at FashionCampNY to address the future of fashion in the 21st Century.

To be held at NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program Center (721 Broadway), FashionCampNY is the first large event to bring together disparate parts of the fashion community to discuss and explore the intersection of fashion and technology. For two days, roughly 300 fashion professionals, designers, innovators and fashion-lovers will teach and converse about the future of fashion, exploring emerging questions through workshops, presentations, and collaboration. It is an “unconference” attended and run by the participants.

I'll be helping run a soft circuits workshop, so come on out!

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The Fall 2009 issue of h+ magazine, edited by our friend R.U. Sirius, is available for free as a downloadable PDF.

The Fall 2009 Issue of h+ Magazine features Erik Davis on Dollhouse, Tweaking Your Neurons, The Psychedelic Transhumanists, Sex and the Singularity, Jonathan Coulton’s Inner Squid, and more.

h+, Fall 2009

Apple just finished their latest press event, and they revealed a number of new services and features for their products. They kicked things off by saying that iPhone OS 3.1 is now available. It will add the Genius recommendation technology to the App store, giving users suggestions on which apps they might find useful based on what others with similar needs use. They're also adding 30,000 ringtones that users can purchase. Next, they announced iTunes 9, which will use Genius to make mixes by analyzing songs in your library to see which go well together. iTunes is also seeing UI improvements for things like app management, and syncing utilities. You'll be able to easily transfer apps, music, and videos from one of your local devices to another, and there is integrated support for Twitter and Facebook if you want to send music as a gift. Another big new feature: iTunes LPs. These LPs will be a digital album with cover art, lyrics, videos, and other customized content created by the artists themselves. Moving on, they showed off a few new games: an Assassin's Creed sequel, an FPS called Nova that had impressive graphics and multiplayer capability, Riddim Ribbon, a futuristic driving/music game that lets you remix your songs by how you navigate the course, and Madden NFL 2010. Next, Apple announced a price cut for the 8GB iPod Touch and a doubling of available storage for the other models. It's also getting OpenGL 2.0. The iPod Classic is getting a storage upgrade from 120GB to 160GB. In addition, there are headphones that have a controller for the Shuffle. Finally, Jobs got down to his "one more thing": Apple will now be building a video camera into the back of every iPod Nano. Apparently it will be a simple matter to sync videos to your computer or put them up on YouTube, and they're building in an FM radio as well. A detailed liveblog of the event with a ton of screenshots is available at Engadget.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It didn't take very long for a whole bunch of you to submit today's Dilbert, where Scott Adams (finally) goes after overly broad patents, with Dilbert announcing that it makes no sense to build things any more, since "all future ideas are already covered by over-general patents": Though, to be fair, Adams seems to confuse patents and trademarks in the second panel (editors?). Still, nice to see Dilbert taking on such an issue.

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This is Lucky Dragon, a 49 foot cruise boat enhanced with a dragon head that breathes fire and water. Created by artist Yanobe Kenji, the mechanical monster is cruising Osaka's ?kawa river and D?tonbori canal until October 12 as part of the Aqua Metropolis festival. More details and photos at Pink Tentacle. "‘Lucky Dragon’ fire-breathing boat in Osaka" (Thanks, Kenny Montana!)

Yanobe Kenji built this awesome fire sculpture boat, called the 'Lucky Dragon', for a festival in ?saka. Named after a Japanese fishing boat that is considered the first victim of an atomic bomb explosion, the sculpture is meant to encourage thoughts about peace.

Thoughts of peace aside, I'd love to see this entered in a dragon boat race! Who would dare to try and pass it?

[via pink tentacle]

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Lucky is a box turtle in Petaluma, California who lost his front legs in what was believed to be an attack by a raccoon. Now he's back in the game with furniture sliders taped to his belly. From the NY Times Regional Media Group:

(Lucky's human companion Sally) Pyne was referred to (veterinary surgeon Robert) Jereb, who has worked on an assortment of animals over the years, including numerous turtles and tortoises whose shells are sometimes repaired with fiberglass, acrylic, Bondo, epoxies and other inorganic substances.

His approach to Lucky's problem was inspired in part by a tortoise about whom he'd read that had a front leg replaced by a halved billiard ball glued to its front shell.

For Lucky, Jereb was thinking more along the lines of PVC pipe but was browsing for materials at a hardware store when he stumbled on the quarter-sized sliders or gliders he ultimately used.

The discs may later be glued on, though so far the tape seems to be working. If Lucky sluffs off shell surface, the discs may need periodic replacement.

Lucky gets new legs

1sockchuck writes "Microsoft wants the engineers in its labs to manage their servers remotely, and is moving development servers from a bevy of computer rooms in labs to a new green data center about 8 miles from its Redmond campus. "I see today as a real transition point in our culture," said Rob Bernard, chief environmental strategist at Microsoft, who acknowledged that the change will be an adjustment for veteran developers but will save money and energy use. Microsoft expects its customers will run their apps remotely in data centers, and clearly expects the same of its employees."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

After this year's World Science Fiction Convention, I was sitting around the bar with some writers and editors and we got to talking about subversive kids' literature. Everyone had their favorites, but then George RR Martin proceeded to describe a book so incredibly twisted, funny and wonderfully wicked that I could scarce believe he wasn't putting me on. But George is the man who introduced me to Froggy the Gremlin from Andy's Gang (immortalized in his classic, page-turning rock-and-roll horror novel The Armageddon Rag) and so I figured he probably knew what he was about.

The book was the 1961 Uncle Shelby's ABZ Book by Shel Silverstein. Yes, that Shel Silverstein, author of many books of justly beloved poetry for children. But Uncle Shelby isn't quite for kids (indeed, recent editions bear the subtitle "A Primer for Adults Only"). No, not really for kids at all.

Because Uncle Shelby is here to teach the kids the alphabet (mostly -- his alphabet goes abzdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyc) with a series of nasty, laugh-out-loud funny exercises and misinformative advice that nearly cost me a keyboard, as I happened to be drinking water while reading it. Some examples:

R is for Red: The fire is red, the fire engine is red, the fireman's hat is red... Too bad the fireman only goes to places WHERE THERE IS A FIRE.

T is for TV: See the nice TV. The TV is warm... The TV loves you. Do you know that there are little elves who live inside the TV? ...If you take Daddy's hammer and break open the TV you will see the funny little elves. What will you name them?

And then there's the penultimate page: WARNING! It is not nice to burn books. It is against the law. If your Mommy or Daddy tries to burn this book, call the POLICE on them.

Uncle Shelby's ABZ Book

TechCrunch points us to a story about an Israeli company by the name of Netex who is claiming a patent over "www.addressing." What's that? Well, apparently it's the process of simply adding a ".com" to the end of a word you put in a browser address bar. There are all sorts of questions raised by this, and the reporting at the Israeli site Ynetnews leaves a lot to be desired. First, neither Ynetnews nor TechCrunch point to the actual patent. I've been searching on both the supposed inventor's name (Aviv Refuah) and his company's name and I can't find it. If anyone out there can find the actual patent, please post a link in the comments.

The next problem with the article is the claim that this patent is "worth millions" and that Google, Microsoft and Yahoo "will have to pay royalties." It remains to be seen if that's true (and given what's stated, it seems quite doubtful).

Next problem? The article claims that this patent is about the address bar in the browser -- not a search engine box -- though, the reporter doesn't seem to understand the difference between the two. Admittedly, Google now offers a browser in Chrome, but the article keeps referring to the patent as a "search option." Yahoo doesn't offer a browser.

Then there's the issue of claiming that Google and Yahoo "use" this technology:

Refuah says various internet giants such as Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo have been using the program for years, and now they will have to pay royalties to Netex.

That implies -- falsely -- that Google, Microsoft and Yahoo have somehow been using some technology that they got from Netex. It's a common trick used in reporting about patents, but its highly misleading. Much, much, much more likely is that Google, Microsoft and Yahoo simply added a useful and obvious feature, that Netex is now showing up and claiming ownership years later.

Finally, it's tough to say much about the actual patent claims in question -- seeing as we haven't seen them -- but from the Ynetnews description, it's difficult to see how such a thing could possibly be considered patentable (and one would think that Netscape would have some prior art, though I can't remember exactly when Netscape added the ability to add .com to the end of something put in the browser bar). But, honestly, can anyone with a straight face explain why such a thing should be patentable?

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

By Kris Magri, engineering intern

One of my favorite tools here at Make: Labs is the plastic bender. The coolest thing about it is using the variac, a giant heavy thing that truly adds some "mad science" cred to any workshop. You plug it in and crank the ginormous dial to vary the amount of AC voltage going through the heating element. How fun is that?

I followed the instructions in MAKE, Volume 10 (Project: Plastic Fantastic Desk Set), and made this spiffy tool holder for the lab.

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Etsy user MikaEle offers this 4 GB thumb drive and original handmade wooden housing, which, as of this writing, is still available for $155 US.

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A Schneier blog post notes that three would-be bombers were recently convicted in the UK thanks in large part to e-mail communication that was intercepted by the US National Security Agency. This was the second time the men had faced criminal charges; in the first trial, the prosecution was unable to make part of their case because they didn't yet have the e-mail evidence. "Although British prosecutors were eager to use the e-mails in their second trial against the three plotters, British courts prohibit the use of evidence obtained through interception. So last January, a US court issued warrants directly to Yahoo to hand over the same correspondence." The BBC posted a number of e-mails used as evidence in the trial. The communication is coded, and some of it looks like what you might find in your spam folder, but the article also provides the prosecution's explanation of what they mean.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

There are nearly 1,000 prehistoric stone circles in Britain. Here's the trailer for a documentary series about them, called Standing with Stones. I just added it to my Netflix queue. (Via TYWKIWDBI)

Sam Miller, the BBC's former South Asia correspondent, is looking for the person who squirts poo on his and other people's shoes in New Delhi's Connaught Place. It's part of a scam - foreigners get a squirt of poo on their shoo when then aren't looking and then a shoe shiner down the road points it out and offers to clean off the poo, for a fee.

Only foreigners get squirted, it seems, and only those wearing closed shoes. My epiphany came when I read the rantings of an American blogger, who described with pride how he pushed and swore at the shoeshine man, adding, "All in all, I feel pretty enlightened that I didn't make him lick it off."

My sympathies were suddenly with the squirter and the shoeshine accomplice. I now sought out the phantom squirter, I wished to befriend him.

I wanted to find out his life story, how he learnt his trade, whether it is a father-son thing. How much money does he make on a good day? Has he ever been caught?

What are the mechanics of squirting, does he use a turkey baster perhaps, or a syringe? And, most of all, what does he tell his family that he does for a living?

Seeking Delhi's 'phantom squirter' (via Neatorama)

Strangpork sez, "Boing Boing fan art created with Quartz Composer, using appropriate iconography." Nice work! Love the repurposed Boing Boing video art!

Boing Boing Iconography / Plaid TV (Thanks, Strangpork!)

traycerb writes "It's been 10 years since 9/9/1999, when the Dreamcast launched on American shores. The hardware was ahead of its time; online capability, web browser, a visual memory unit, and a controller that anticipated the much-loved Xbox 360 controller. The games were amazing: Jet Set Radio (the first popular 3d cell-shaded game on a console), Marvel vs. Capcom 2 (still the apotheosis of 2-d fighting; just try finding a copy on ebay), Soul Calibur (still looks good compared to the recent Xbox/PS3 versions), NFL 2K (came out of nowhere, and was so good that it shook EA into spending tens of millions of dollars to seal up exclusivity for NFL rights), and many others. No doubt some of the reasons for the Dreamcast's demise lay with Sega, whose dubious hardware decisions (ahem, 32x) finally caught up to them, in the form of ambivalence from both developers and gamers, just as the console-making world was shifting to the multinationals with big pockets who were willing to spend it on pricey hardware design (or could absorb the cost of faulty hardware design). It was also one of the first consoles widely used for homebrew. In honor of the 10th anniversary, a new game is being released for the Dreamcast, called Rush Rush Rally Racing. The Dreamcast is dead! Long live the Dreamcast!"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Cool Hunting produced this video about Ron Arad and his MoMA retrospective, which is up through October 19.

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Let's play a little hypothetical. Let's say that someone had discovered a way to automatically -- without any additional cost -- create all the food that the world's population needed, and automatically have it appear wherever and whenever needed. Think of it like the "replicator" device in Star Trek, where you can just walk up to it, and it'll create whatever food you want. The entire issue of hunger and worries about the "scarce resource" of food would go away. Who, in their right mind, would want to break such a machine, and force this newly abundant resource back to being scarce?

Yet, that seems to be exactly what's happening in the music world. A whole bunch of folks have sent in this positively ridiculous attempt by some guy named Paul Sweazey to get the IEEE to endorse a new standard to make content act more like physical property by allowing it to be "stolen." It's basically a weird DRM system that would allow the content to be fully "taken away" from the original holder. I've read the article a few times, and I have to be honest, that I don't quite get it. Those who get the content would still be able to share the actual content with whoever they wanted, however many times they wanted it -- but there's a separate "playkey" and someone can "take" that away, such that those who had it before can't use it after. But why would anyone "take" the playkey, other than to be a jackass?

But the bigger issue is why bother in the first place? Why purposely try to limit an abundant resource by making it scarce? Sweazey claims:

His answer is that such freely-copiable goods breaks the basic business model of human commerce by making goods nonrivalrous; it no longer has aspects of a private good, and this makes it difficult to sell.

But, this is wrong. It shows an out-of-date understanding of economics. While it may mean that you can't directly create a (paid) market in that private good, it opens up and enables many more markets. Going back to the food analogy: if you had many more people in the world who weren't hungry, and didn't have to spend all their money on food or food production, would that be good or bad for the economy? It seems rather obvious that it would be good, as money could be spent on higher level things that expand the economy.

Taking an abundant resource and actively working to make it act like a scarce resource makes no sense. It limits progress and the wider economy, and it's the last thing that a group like the IEEE should be supporting.

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Arthur Flegenheimer, aka Dutch Schultz, was a 1930s German-Jewish-American gangster who was killed while taking a leak in a New Jersey bar. After he was shot, Schultz delivered a fantastically strange stream-of-consciousness rant involving "French Canadian bean soup" and this brilliant bit:

You can play jacks, and girls do that with a soft ball and do tricks with it.
Oh, Oh, dog Biscuit, and when he is happy he doesn't get snappy.

Of course, Schultz's last words later inspired writers William S. Burroughs, Robert Anton Wilson, and Robert Shea. Besides his mastery of avant-garde poetry, Schultz is also famous for a secret he took to his grave: the location of a safe loaded with $7 million that he buried somewhere in upstate New York. It has never been found. Or if it has, the finders ain't talking. From Mental Floss's "Six Lost Treasures Just Waiting To Be Found":

The only other person (besides Schultz) who knew where the safe was buried was the bodyguard who helped him dig the hole. Shortly after, both men were gunned down by hitmen inside the Palace Chophouse Restaurant in Newark, New Jersey.

On his deathbed, Schultz began hallucinating and rambling after the rusty bullets used by the assassins caused an infection. A court stenographer was brought in to record his statements and some believe his incoherent references to something hidden in the woods in Phoenicia, New York, might be a clue to the location of his buried loot. Of course the meaning of his words is cryptic and not 100% reliable, but that hasn’t stopped hundreds of people from looking.

Six Lost Treasures Just Waiting To Be Found

newscloud writes "A twitter-savvy, gluten-free pizza shop nabbed missing Wired magazine writer Evan Ratliff in New Orleans early on Tuesday to win the $5,000 Vanish contest. Ratliff was ensnared in part by repeated non-TOR visits to our Facebook application, launched to support the contest's tracker community, and his secret travel journal on Twitter. 'The Vanish Team application became part of the game — essentially a trap for Evan — one he stumbled into each day knowingly and willingly. This is something that we would never do with our Facebook technology if Evan hadn't asked us to pursue him - but it's a useful reminder of "relative" anonymity on the Web.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Sure. Of course. I am a totally f*cked up human being.

Now that that's out of the way, let me explain.

Last night on Twitter, Staci Kramer of PaidContent asked what's the difference betwen the default list in River2 and Twitter's suggested user list.

There's a qualitative difference and a quantitative one.

I use the default list for two purposes: 1. To provide an initial user experience that isn't blank. In this sense it is like Twitter's list. 2. To highlight interesting uses of RSS and clouds and reading lists, things I want to encourage people to support. By throwing them a bit of recognition, I hope to create an incentive to support the features that River2 is leading the way with. I did this with Radio too. I do it with Scripting News. I'm unabashed about it. It's how you bootstrap new stuff. It's a good thing.

No one has paid for position on the list, but I don't guarantee that I will never sell a position on the list. But I will never put a feed on the list that I wouldn't put there if they didn't pay.

Now for the differences.

1. My list is like the default list in Tweetdeck or Tweetie or Google Reader. I don't have a monopoly. I am not the only game in town. If people dislike my choices they can vote with their feet. Twitter is the whole ballgame. As I said yesterday, it's as if Google favored their friends in search results. Or if Tim Berners-Lee made it so that 1/4 of every web page had an ad for Om, ReadWriteWeb or TechCrunch.

2. I have a shopping list in my pocket. On it I list products I'm going to buy when I go to the supermarket. That's also like the Suggested User List. The products on the list profit from being there. But Chef Boyardee won't notice whether or not he's on my list (he's not). River2 is a teeny weeny little product compared to the mighty Twitter, which delivers hundreds of thousands of followers to people on its list.

3. I try not to influence editorial content through my choices. I've gone with big pubs like Reuters, BBC, the Guardian, CNET, NYT. Their techies hopefully will appreciate the respect, but if it influences the writers I will remove it immediately. In TwitterLand, the problem isn't so much that Twitter tries to influence, that's understandable, it's that the reporters don't object.

There will continue to be a default list in River2.

Recently on Offworld, German developer Exozet revealed not only the first screenshot for the upcoming official iPhone version of Catan, but also opened a limited number of beta applications to the public, meaning you might be getting your hands on the game much earlier than expected. Elsewhere, Adam Saltsman proved out just how successful rapid prototyping is and announced an iPhone port of his already widely viral one-button game Canabalt, ngmoco finally revealed its online arena iPhone FPS Eliminate with an interesting take on microtransactions, and Capcom showed more of its fantastically illustrated diminutive DS sequel Okamiden (above). We also went behind the pixel/Rubiks with a video interview with guerrilla artist Invader, saw the Max Max-ian shooter Borderlands go all Christian-Bale-flip-out, found a collection of stunning custom Team Fortress 2 figures, ordered Famicom and Pac-Man business card holders, and our 'one shot's for the day: the BeatlesBox 360, and the most invulnerable he-Link the Legend of Zelda will ever see.

Here's a screen shot of one of the objects that makes up the River2 aggregator.



The top of the script is a blog.

We've always done it this way. There are scripts in the system that are still in use with "posts" at the top that date back to the mid-90s. From lots of team members, most of whom have gone on to other things. I imagine they've taken some of our practices with them, as we inherited practices from teams we came from and code we used to work on. There's a culture to programming that's mostly invisible to non-programmers.

Another example of Narrate Your Work, the philosophy of the blogger and reporter.

A whole bunch of folks have sent in this rather odd legal dispute up in Canada, with real estate firm Century 21 Canada suing telco Rogers and its subsidiary Zoocasa for creating what appears to be a real estate info portal/search engine. At issue: Zoocasa apparently scrapes various real estate listings, including those from Century 21 Canada, to provide them in its own search results, along with some additional info -- but still links back to the original Century 21 listing. In other words, it acts like a basic search engine. It's difficult to see how or why that should be against the law.

Of course, the real estate business has always been focused on bogus exclusions on data though the MLS system -- and apparently they don't like the idea of that data being more widely available. But, still, it's difficult to see what right Century 21 has to complain about, since the site links to Century 21 postings and should only provide them with more traffic. Unless, of course, its fear is that it can't compete by offering enough useful info on its own site.

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holy_calamity writes "Now that Sony has announced it will sell 3D-capable televisions in 2010, people are thinking more seriously about the rocky road leading to mainstream 3D TV adoption. New Scientist says that not only do program makers lack the technology to make shows in 3D, but that little is known about the creative problems posed by shooting shows that make use of a whole new dimension, and what works for audiences. Engadget's own pundit focuses on the more predictable problems of format wars between competing 3D display technologies. Suddenly 2010 seems a little too soon."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

YouTuber raiian shares some video of a job well done -

I had been sitting on the idea for a while but never got the chance to use it. Finally for this upcoming labor day the local Safeway asked us at Pepsi to do a large display and usually we build a giant American flag but having already done that for the 4th of July the store wanted something different. So I was finally able to put my idea into motion and we got it done: 3 guys, 1000 twelve packs, and 4 hours later.

Seeing creativity at work in an unusual locale is always . . refreshing
!

Related:

8-bit Post-It art

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Safari Ltd., makers of those plastic dinosaurs and animals found in natural history museum gift shops and kids' rooms, is releasing a coelacanth figurine next year. Of course, the coelacanth is a darling of cryptozoologists. The fish was thought to have been extinct for 65 million years until one was found alive in 1938. Safari Ltd.'s coelacanth model is 5.75 inches long and 3 inches high. I wish it was life size and suitable for wall mounting! Loren Coleman has the details at Cryptomundo. "Wild Safari Coelecanth"

Korean blogger Cho Woong has a massive collection of Star Wars stuff and it is deeply organized.
"[W.C] Introduce. My Star Wars Collection" (via Cribcandy)

Kumiki puzzles, as they're known, have been manufactured in the Ashigarashimo district of central Japan since the late 19th century, but the traditional fastenerless joinery techniques from which their intricate designs are derived are truly ancient. Kumiki puzzles are commonly representative, prototypically taking the form of traditional Japanese buildings, but more often, today, of animals or vehicles. Abstract kumiki are only slightly less common, the so-called "Great Pagoda," a commonly known type of octahedral burr puzzle, being a prime example.

The top photo is taken from this Japanese site. A wide selection of kumiki are available in the US through Cleverwood.

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saudadelinux writes "Last year, the Tolkien Trust, which administers JRR's estate, bellowed stentoriously, 'Youuuu shall not make The Hobbit!' and sued New Line Cinema for 'a reported $220m (£133m) in compensation, based on breach of contract and fraud.' New Line, chastened, has settled for an undisclosed sum of money. The Trust has given its blessing to New Line for Guillermo del Toro to film The Hobbit and for New Line to make other films based on Tolkien's work. Much rejoicing!"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Two weeks ago we visited the Leica Factory in Solms, Germany, for an introduction to the M9 and X1 cameras, and the S2 medium format DSLR system. As well as discussing these new products, we were given a guided tour of the production and assembly areas for the M series rangefinders (including the M9), the M lenses and the S2. Click through for an insight into the painstaking process by which Leica puts together its cameras and lenses.

Alongside the M9 Leica has also announced the X1, a compact camera with a large APS-C sensor and a fixed 35mm equivalent field-of-view F2.8 autofocus lens. Featuring a design reminiscent of M-series rangefinders, complete with analogue-style shutter speed and aperture dials, the camera offers a choice of fully automatic or manual control. A 2.7" LCD and 12Mp CMOS sensor with an ISO range of 100 to 3200 round off the specification. Registered owners will be able to download a copy of Adobe Lightroom to process the camera's DNG raw files. During our visit to Leica two weeks ago we were lucky enough to get our hands on a pre-production camera, click through for our initial impression and hands-on pictures.

Leica has officially revealed the M9 - a full frame version of its M-mount rangefinder. The Leica M9, with its 24 x 36mm, 18 megapixel sensor is, according to the company: 'the world's smallest full-frame system camera.' The body is available in a new 'Steel Gray' finish and offers minor button re-arrangement over the M8 - all the major changes relate to the internals. The Kodak-developed CCD sensor features improved offset microlenses to optimize performance at the edges of the frame along with a sensor cover with improved filtering of infrared light so lens-mounted IR filters are no longer needed. Most importantly, the 35mm film-sized sensor means every Leica M-mount lens provides the originally intended field of view.

Al writes "MIT neuroscientist Ed Boyden has a column discussing the potential dangers of building super-intelligent machines without building in some sort of motivation or drive. Boyden warns that a very clever AI without a sense of purpose might very well 'realize the impermanence of everything, calculate that the sun will burn out in a few billion years, and decide to play video games for the remainder of its existence.' He also notes that the complexity and uncertainty of the universe could easily overwhelm the decision-making process of this intelligence — a problem that many humans also struggle with. Boyden will give a talk on the subject at the forthcoming Singularity Summit."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Michael Scott alerts us to the news that e-voting firm ES&S has sued two former employees, claiming copyright infringement over code they took with them from ES&S, along with additional trade secrets. I have no idea whether or not this is true, but all I can ask is "why?" As has been documented time and time again, ES&S's e-voting code has a ton of problems. Remember, these are the machines that have been found to have serious security vulnerabilities, with some serious bugs, such as adding votes to the wrong election, calibration problems that lead to people voting for the wrong candidate, and bugs that resulted in phantom votes. And ES&S is the company that knew about some of these bugs, and let them be used in elections anyway. So if you were going to go off and start your own e-voting company (and it's not clear these individuals did that), wouldn't you be better off starting from scratch?

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DT sez, "A very swell Marxist deconstruction of the The Crayola Factory: A Hands-on Discovery Center. Slightly self-depreciating, somewhat wry, very erudite and extremely accurate. Complex but very, very good."

And so was born the Crayola Factory [sic] Tour. A single production line of original machinery was reassembled in a glassed-in, toplit soundstage. It is tended by a lone, young worker/performer, who demonstrates the crayonmaking process a couple of times each hour. Armed with a headset mic and a remote, he controls overhead lights and cameras and guides the audience's attention to monitors which show close-ups of each step. In other words, the entire Crayola Factory Experience is geared to the re-enactment and re-viewing of the original Mister Rogers/Sesame Street films.

But what, besides the jazzy soundtrack, is missing from this picture? In its attempt to recreate the authentic production line, which actually makes the little souvenir 4-packs of crayons handed out to the audience, Crayola has eliminated the labor. Instead of the five older, unionized workers seen in the Sesame Street film, the Factory performance is run by one young retail/service industry employee earning minimum wage.

Which sucks for the folks stuck in a depressed central Pennsylvania town with nothing but retail or restaurant jobs, sure, but it doesn't let us, the shopper/viewer off the hook, either. As the very act of seeking out an authentic reliving of a memory of a TV show demonstrates. By emphasizing the production of works of culture, which we all share, Karl Mannheim expanded Marx's theory of alienation from the proletariat to everyone. These works of culture which we internalize, and which which we identify our selves, are beyond our control. Adorno and Horkheimer, meanwhile, saw capitalism exploiting this alienation, by transforming self-expression into the consumption of "cultural commodities."

The Triumph Of The Crayolatariat (Thanks, DT!)

SillySnake sends in a report from the Telegraph on draft plans in China to restrict exports of rare earths. "Beijing is drawing up plans to prohibit or restrict exports of rare earth metals that are produced only in China and play a vital role in cutting edge technology, from hybrid cars and catalytic converters, to superconductors, and precision-guided weapons. A draft report by China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has called for a total ban on foreign shipments of terbium, dysprosium, yttrium, thulium, and lutetium. Other metals such as neodymium, europium, cerium, and lanthanum will be restricted to a combined export quota of 35,000 tonnes a year, far below global needs."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Tomorrow (Thursday) night, I'm appearing on stage in London with my fellow sf writers Gwyneth Jones, Ian Watson and Matthew de Abaitua for an odd live event called "The BAD IDEA Butcher's Shop: FUTURE HUMAN." Here's the pitch:

The Butcher's Shop is a unique writers' workshop and theatrical experience. Hosted by BAD IDEA's editors at the Old Operating Theatre Museum in London, short stories submitted by guests are dissected, chopped up, and improved through an intensive process of live editing and debate.

It's £12 to attend, and attendees are given free gin (!), and it runs 7pm - 9pm at the Old Operating Theatre Museum and Herb Garret, 9a St. Thomas's St., London SE1 9RY.

Hope to see you!

The BAD IDEA Butcher's Shop: FUTURE HUMAN

The folks over at recombu.com demonstrate a subtle finesse of low and high tech in this retro-futuristic iPhone robot mask tutorial.

If you're like the Recombu team then you'll often struggle to decide what to wear to a fancy dress party, but we think we've come up with a pretty nifty solution. Using an iPhone, the MouthOff app and some household goods we've created a robot mask.

[via Andrew Lim]

In the Maker Shed:
<img src="http://blog.craftzine.com/makershedsmall.jpg" height="45" width="200" border="0" hspace="4" vspace="4" alt="Makershedsmall-1" /

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Two great Drawdio videos from Ars Electronica Festival via leobard & Jay! Kit is available in the Maker Shed too!

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One thing that's consistent throughout all of the stories we see concerning the recording industry trying to support its position in lawsuits, and in front of politicians, the press and the public, is that it's doing all of this to help the "artists" it represents. Of course, that's laughable, given just how many stories we've seen of artists screwed over by the major labels. The record labels have never represented the artists' best interests. For yet another example, we head south of the border, where Alejandro Fernandez is claiming that Sony Music "pirated" his music. He used to have a contract with Sony, but when he completed that contract, he moved over to Universal Music. Yet, Sony still prepared to put out a CD of "unreleased material" by Fernandez. Fernandez claims that the works are unauthorized, and even had the police in Mexico raid Sony Music's offices and confiscate the CDs.

All in all, this comes down to a basic contract dispute. Sony Music claims that it has the right to do whatever it wants with any music recorded under the contract. Fernandez claims the rights were limited to seven albums -- which were all done -- and do not extend to material that went unreleased. This sounds similar to the dispute last month, where Morrissey told fans not to buy a new box set that EMI was putting out. Either way, it's yet another example that labels' interests and artists' interests are not aligned.

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If this little Arduino powered robot doesn't make you smile, nothing will. There isn't any build information, but making a similar robot shouldn't be too difficult thanks to the very helpful servo library. [via Arduino.cc]


In the Maker Shed:


Make: Arduino

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EthanV2 sends in BBC coverage of the merger plans of Orange and T-Mobile in the UK. "T-Mobile and Orange plan to merge their UK businesses, creating a mobile phone giant with 28.4 million customers. If completed, a deal between Deutsche Telekom's T-Mobile and Orange owner France Telecom would see a firm with sales of €9.4 B (£7.0 B, $13.4 B). It would be the UK's largest provider, overtaking Telefonica's O2, with about 37% of the mobile market. ... However, it is likely that competition authorities in the UK and EU will probe the deal."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Welcome to MAKE bundle is perfect for any of our online readers that haven't subscribed to the print edition of MAKE Magazine. For a limited time we are offering the Welcome to MAKE bundle at an amazing discount of $48. That's 46% off the price if you purchased these items individually.

The Welcome to MAKE bundle includes:

• A Year subscription to MAKE Magazine $34.95 value
• The Best of MAKE $34.99 value
• A Maker's Notebook $19.99 value

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There are a bunch of different "child filtering/monitoring" software on the market these days, and many parents use it to help them keep track of what their kids do online. I have no problem with this -- so long as such filters aren't mandated by the government. But it appears that just selling the tools isn't enough for some companies. JJ sends in the news that one of the top providers in the space doesn't just monitor what kids do for parents, but collects all the data -- including the text of chat room discussions -- and resells it to marketers. You have to imagine that this isn't exactly what the FTC (or parents) expects of such tools.

The company defends the practice, claiming that the data is anonymized and no identifiable data is included -- but we've heard that before. Every single time someone insists their data is anonymized, news breaks showing that it is not. I don't think there's anything wrong, necessarily, with doing targeted marketing programs, but using unsuspecting parents and getting them to install filters and monitoring software, without realizing the data will be handed over to marketing firms, seems pretty sleazy.

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The Harvard Crimson took an ad from "The Committee for the Open Debate on the Holocaust," a front for Holocaust denier Bradley Smith.

Bradley Smith, the founder of the organization that placed the ad, is a known Holocaust denier who has been identified for his hiding behind the veil of free speech in America. Here's his coolest quote: "I don't want to spend time with adults anymore. I want to go to students. They are superficial. They are empty vessels to be filled."

Harvard Crimson Publishes Holocaust Denial Ad (Thanks, Adam!)

Update: The Crimson has apologized for running the ad, saying it was the result of an unspecified oversight: "Yesterday's advertisement was the result of that miscommunication. And while running the ad was not our intent, we accept responsibility for our failure to carry out the planned cancellation. We recognize how sensitive a subject this is for our community and appreciate all the e-mails and letters we have received about it from concerned members of the University. We have made sure that the rest of the ad's planned run has been terminated, and any money that has changed hands in exchange for the ad to date will be returned. "

Cause for celebration: the new issue of Flurb, Rudy Rucker's wonderful free sf zine, is live, including work from Greg Benford, Paul Di Filippo, Howard Hendrix, and many other talented and lovely individuals.

We have a lot of great stuff in Flurb #8. A big thanks to all the writers!

This summer I taught a writing workshop at Clarion West in Seattle, and one of favorite stories I saw there was "My Only Sunshine," by the new writer Emily C. Skaftun. It has a mythic feel and a nice twist at the end.

The old pro Gregory Benford brings us a short and snappy piece, "Paradise Afternoon," about longevity.

Wonderfully weird Charlie Jane Anders is back for another Flurb appearance, with "Henry's Penis," a rather touching coming of age story, complete with hardcore nanotech.

Flurb: A Webzine of Astonishing Tales, Issue #8, Fall-Winter, 2009

Nice work here: [_n3o_] shoved an 80GB hard drive into an old GameBoy, replacing the screen with a printout that makes it appear that a game is running, and hooking up the power-light to the drive's power.

Exclusif LS : Une gameboy de 80Gb ! (via IZ Reloaded)

Researchers at Ohio State University have studied the relationship that hairdressers have to older clients, who are apt to discussing all their problems during haircuts. As such, the stylists are well-situated to act as early-warning systems for dementia, neglect and poor health.

"Hair stylists are in a great position to notice when their older clients are starting to suffer from depression, dementia, or self-neglect," said Keith Anderson, co-author of the study and assistant professor of social work at Ohio State University.

"While not expecting too much beyond the scope of their jobs, we may be able to help stylists direct elderly people in trouble to community services..."

"Their older clients may sit in a chair for an hour or longer while they're having their hair done, and this may happen once or twice a month. So stylists are in a good position to recognize when things change with a client, and when they may need help."

Hairstylists Can Help Identify Older Clients Who Need Health Services

destinyland writes "Cyberdyne has started renting their exoskeleton body suits in Japan. The mind-controlled wearable machine increases strength and endurance, and rents for $2,300 a month. (Sensors on the skin detect traces of nerve signals from the brain, synchronizing the power suit's movements with the user's own limbs.) New video shows the suits in use on the streets of Tokyo, and the concept may be catching on. DARPA now has a program called Exoskeletons for Human Performance Augmentation 'to develop devices and machines that will increase the speed, strength and endurance of soldiers in combat environments.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

3D printing comes to custom jewelry: this German company will let you pick your favorite piece of terrain from the planet Earth and they'll make a silver brooch featuing it. I'm holding out for the hyper-detailed version that includes nanoscale clockwork people who meander up and down your tiny silver mountains making ultrasonic bird calls.

The Earth Brooch Silver is an eclectic custom piece of jewelry you can easily design yourself. Just select your desired location. Within a few seconds the place's distinctive landscape turns into a 3d-preview of your custom jewelry.

As soon as you are satisfied with the preview we cast the custom brooch with fascinating detail in 975 silver. The Earth Brooch Silver perfectly makes for a unique silver wedding or other special anniversary gift.

Earth Brooch Silver (via Futurismic)

Almost exactly a decade ago, we wrote about how it was quite easy for people to get passwords from AOL users. Somehow, somewhere, for many years, that post was one of the top results for people searching on "steal AOL passwords," meaning that (to this date) it's been one of our most commented on posts, with tons of clueless individuals asking in the comments how to steal someone's password. So, it wasn't much of a surprise to me to find out that there are a bunch of services out there doing a brisk business in selling the ability to hack email accounts for about $100 per account (cheaper in some cases), and there really isn't that much to be done about it. It's not a big enough problem for authorities to really care about. Even if they did crack down, it wouldn't stop the activity at all -- others would quickly pop up offering the same thing. Still, it's fascinating to see how blatant some of the services are in advertising their wares. You would think that they'd try to be at least a little subtle. However, I guess with so little likelihood of getting in trouble for it, those offering such services don't see any advantage in not being upfront.

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Big Daddy (Bioshock) costume. Harrison writes -

I finally lost my mind enough to try to tackle one of these big guys. For those unfamiliar, Big Daddys are the protectors of the Little Sisters in Rapture, an underwater city devoid of morality which has degenerated into chaos and insanity. They are huge, fast, strong, and as it turns out, a solid pain in the a** to build.

Check out all fiftybillion build photos, incredible... Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Crafts | Digg this!

Dave from the Wondermark webtoon sez, "Hi folks. I made a steampunk helicopter for my most recent Wondermark comic. It's collaged together in my usual fashion from scans of old Scientific American magazines. I've been making helicopter noises with my mouth as I walk around this morning and realized that I'm just super duper proud of it, so I thought I would share. Thanks, hope you like it!"

Wondermark » Archive » #550; In which Salvation is summoned (Thanks, Dave!

Attract some helpers to your garden with Instructables user icecreamterror's beneficial bug house!

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For the most part, the US has recognized that the right to be anonymous is a form of protected free speech -- and yet, anonymity is constantly under attack. Of course, the right to be anonymous is not absolute, but there is value in allowing anonymous speech to occur. With the right to anonymity under attack in the US, it's even worse in other countries, where such rights aren't even seen as vital as it is in the US. China, for example, is now requiring news websites to force all commenters to reveal their real identity. Apparently, the government issued a directive demanding such info from all commenters, though, they don't want to admit it. Even though the newspapers are claiming that they're doing it to increase "civility" and "social responsibility," quietly they admit that it's the government. As for why the gov't won't just come out and say it's for civility and social responsibility (even if it's to quiet critics), apparently the government is afraid of public backlash:

"The influence of public opinion on the Net is still too big."

I guess that's why the idea is to silence them.

Meanwhile, as reports came in last week suggesting that Australia's latest plan to censor the internet is just about dead, Slashdot notes that Scientologists down under are asking the Australian gov't to implement severe restrictions on what they refer to as "Religious Vilification" (which, one assumes, means any anti-Scientology comments, among other things). The proposal also suggests that any such site should not be allowed to be operated anonymously. Apparently, Scientologists took the name of the group "Anonymous" that organized protests against the group quite literally.

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We are saddened to report that Robert Spinrad, father of MAKE Project Editor Paul Spinrad, has died. From John Markoff's NYTimes obit:

Robert J. Spinrad, a computer designer who carried out pioneering work in scientific automation at Brookhaven National Laboratory and who later was director of Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center while the personal computing technology invented there in the 1970s was commercialized, died on Wednesday in Palo Alto, Calif. He was 77.

Trained in electrical engineering before computer science was a widely taught discipline, Dr. Spinrad built his own computer from discarded telephone switching equipment while he was a student at Columbia.

He said that while he was proud of his creation, at the time most people had no interest in the machines. "I may as well have been talking about the study of Kwakiutl Indians, for all my friends knew," he told a reporter for The New York Times in 1983.

[...]

At Brookhaven he would design a room-size, tube-based computer he named Merlin, as part of an early generation of computer systems used to automate scientific experimentation. He referred to the machine, which was built before transistors were widely used in computers, as "the last of the dinosaurs."

Our best and our condolences to Paul and his family.

Robert Spinrad, a Pioneer in Computing, Dies at 77 [annoying login required]

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New York City Garbage by Justin Gignac -- Thank You for Littering.™... Limited edition garbage.

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Mitch Horowitz is the editor-in-chief of Tarcher/Penguin and responsible for the publication of such seminal esoterica books as Manly P. Hall's The Secret Teachings of All Ages: Reader's Edition, The Book of the Damned: The Collected Works of Charles Fort, and a slew of other contemporary and classic works of high weirdness. Mitch is also a great writer on the occult himself. His own new book, Occult America: The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation, went on sale today. I haven't read it yet, but Mitch wrote an overview of the book for Graham Hancock's site and it's terrific. I'm delighted that Mitch is going to guestblog on Boing Boing a few weeks from now too! I'm sure every post will be a gem from the equinox. From Mitch's essay, also titled Occult America:

By the 1830s and 40s, a region of central New York State called "the Burned-Over District" (so-named for its religious passions) became the magnetic center for the religious radicalism sweeping the young nation. Stretching from Albany to Buffalo, it was the Mt. Sinai of American mysticism, giving birth to new religions such as Mormonism and Seventh-Day Adventism, and also to the spread of Spiritualism, Mesmerism, mediumship, table-rapping, séances, and other occult sensations - many of which mirrored, and aided, the rise of Suffragism and related progressive movements.

The nation's occult culture gave women their first opportunity to openly serve as religious leaders - in this case as spirit mediums, seers, and channlers. America's social and spiritual radicals were becoming joined, and the partnership would never fade.

The robust growth of occult and mystical movements in nineteenth-century America was aided by the influence of three mighty social and spiritual movements: Freemasonry, Transcendentalism, and Spiritualism. Each helped transform the young nation into a laboratory for religious experiment and a springboard for the revolutions in nontraditional and therapeutic spirituality that eventually swept the globe. Consider:

• Freemasonry is, perhaps, a direct remnant of the most radical thought movement to emerge from the Reformation, and it instilled a strong anti-authoritarian streak in America's early religious culture. Masonry's penchant for occult and pagan symbolism suggests how some of the nation's Founders - many of whom were Masons - understood religious truth as emanating from a common source that could be found in different cultures throughout history, including those of a mystical and pre-Christian past. American Masonry emphasized religious tolerance, which its highly placed members, including George Washington (pictured in Masonic garb at left) and Benjamin Franklin, modeled and interwove throughout American life. Early in his presidency, Washington took matters a step further. In a letter to the congregation of a Rhode Island synagogue, the first president wrote: "It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent national gifts." In other words, minority religions were no longer guests of the new republic, but full members. Whatever Freemasonry's airs of secrecy and images of skulls, pyramids, and all-seeing eyes, it is in this principle where one finds the order's truly most radical, even dangerous, idea: the encouragement of different faiths within a single nation.

"Occult America" at the Official Graham Hancock Website

Buy "Occult America: The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation"

Biohacking: Hacking goes squishy @ The Economist

MANY of the world’s great innovators started out as hackers—people who like to tinker with technology—and some of the largest technology companies started in garages. Thomas Edison built General Electric on the foundation of an improved way to transmit messages down telegraph wires, which he cooked up himself. Hewlett-Packard was founded in a garage in California (now a national landmark), as was Google, many years later. And, in addition to computer hardware and software, garage hackers and home-build enthusiasts are now merrily cooking up electric cars, drone aircraft and rockets. But what about biology? Might biohacking—tinkering with the DNA of existing organisms to create new ones—lead to innovations of a biological nature?

And as the price falls, amateurs are wasting little time getting started. Several groups are already hard at work finding ways to duplicate at home the techniques used by government laboratories and large corporations. One place for them to learn about biohacking is DIYbio, a group that holds meetings in America and Britain and has about 800 people signed up for its newsletter. DIYbio plans to perform experiments such as sending out its members in different cities to swab public objects. The DNA thus collected could be used to make a map showing the spread of micro-organisms.

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mnmlst notes a Wall Street Journal story (picked up at Total Telecom) on the move of some patents originally held by Microsoft to the Open Invention Network, where they will join a portfolio whose purpose is to inoculate open source companies against patent trolls. OIN is near a deal to buy 22 patents from another patent-protective group, Allied Security Trust, whose members include Verizon, Cisco, and HP. AST won the patents in a private auction Microsoft put on earlier. An AST executive says that "Microsoft presented the patents to potential bidders in its auction as relating to Linux." While OIN's acquisition of the patents will act to protect the Linux community, AST, by contrast, exists to protect only its corporate members, not the community as a whole. But by selling the patents to OIN, they are cooperating in the protection of Linux. And by allowing the patents to go to AST in the first place, Microsoft may (the article implies) be signaling at least their lack of active intent to disrupt the Linux marketplace.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

mnmlst notes a Wall Street Journal story (picked up at Total Telecom) on the move of some patents originally held by Microsoft to the Open Invention Network, where they will join a portfolio whose purpose is to inoculate open source companies against patent trolls. OIN is near a deal to buy 22 patents from another patent-protective group, Allied Security Trust, whose members include Verizon, Cisco, and HP. AST won the patents in a private auction Microsoft put on earlier. An AST executive says that "Microsoft presented the patents to potential bidders in its auction as relating to Linux." While OIN's acquisition of the patents will act to protect the Linux community, AST, by contrasts, exists to protect only its corporate members, not the community as a whole. But by selling the patents to OIN, they are cooperating in the protection of Linux. And by allowing the patents to go to AST in the first place, Microsoft may (the article implies) be signaling at least their lack of active intent to disrupt the Linux marketplace.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The big ratings agencies, Moody's and S&P have taken something of a beating for their role in the financial crisis -- often rating pure junk as if it were pure gold. But, of course, in the rush to find someone to blame legally, it made little sense to go after the ratings agencies. The real problem wasn't that the ratings sucked (they did), but that federal regulations gave those ratings power in the law. This made those ratings not only more important, but gave them an official "stamp of approval" such that people assumed (incorrectly, obviously) that they must be accurate. The idea that a small group of guys sitting in an office could more accurately rate the risk of debt over the actual market seems rather absurd -- and yet, we gave it the federal stamp of approval. Still, as bad as the ratings were, there shouldn't be any legal consequence for getting the ratings wrong. After all, unless there was evidence of outright fraud, the ratings are simply opinions, which are protected by the First Amendment... or so we thought.

In a ruling last week, a judge has noted that ratings agencies' ratings are not protected free speech if they're only disseminated to a small group of people, rather than the wider public. While the ruling cites a few earlier cases, I have to admit that I have trouble understanding this reasoning. I don't recall anything in the First Amendment that says the government can restrict freedom of expression if it's to a small group of people, but not if it's to a large group of people. This probably isn't a huge deal for the ratings agencies -- though, it will keep them busy with some lawsuits that may cost them some money. The bigger "problem" in the market came from relying on their public ratings -- and those should (still) be protected.

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This 3D printed clock by Peter Schmitt looks pretty interesting. Though printing the mechanism in this manner is currently much more costly than making the parts using an injection molding process, he makes the case that cutting out the assembly process could potentially make this process more efficient over all.

[via hyperexperience]

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adeelarshad82 writes "Yet more confirmation has emerged that Asus plans its own e-book reader. An Asus representative in the UK appears to have confirmed this, with the additional details that there may be a value-priced as well as a premium version. The article guesses at the price point for the low-end model — around £100 ($192). Unlike current e-book readers, which take the form of a single flat screen, the Asus device has a hinged spine, like a printed book. This, in theory, enables its owner to read an e-book much like a normal book, using the touchscreen to 'turn' the pages from one screen to the next. Asus showed off a prototype of the device at the CeBIT trade show in March." Reader NeverBotedBush adds, "Asus's e-reader will likely have color touch screens, a speaker, a webcam, and a microphone, along with the capability to make inexpensive Skype calls." The color screen rules out using E Ink technology, so long battery life seems to be unlikely.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I recently explained why I thought Sprint made a rather large strategic marketing error in pricing the Palm Pre at the equivalent price of an iPhone: $199 (after annoying mail-in rebate that turns many buyers off). In fact, I argued why it would make a lot more sense to further subsidize the phone all the way to free, and make up the money on the backend with more subscriptions. Given how heavily invested Sprint was in the Pre, and how pathetic the sales have been to date, it really makes very little sense to keep the price so high. So, at the very least, I thought it was a good first step this morning when it was "announced" that Sprint was offering the Pre at $99. Of course, there were some silly things about this promotion as well. First, it only applied to new customers, transferring numbers over from other carriers. What better way to mock your loyal customers than to offer others a better deal? Second, they didn't just discount the phone, but gave you a "credit" that was split over the first three bills (better than a mail-in rebate, but still annoying). However, what was even stranger was that Sprint didn't even seem to understand the promotion itself. John Paczkowski noted that in some places on Sprint's website it said the promotion ran until October 10th. In others it said October 31st.

Apparently, the confusion at Sprint headquarters went well beyond that, because as the company attempted to sort out the confusion, it announced that it was doing away with the special promotion entirely. And yet, even after announcing it, the offer page remained on Sprint's site. It's not at all clear what happened here, other than Sprint seems somewhat clueless in how to do basic promotions, pricing and marketing. Obviously, the company intended to offer the phone for $99 -- it's on the company's own site. And yet, now it's suddenly claiming that it was a mistake? I can already see the business school case study on how not to launch an innovative smart phone.

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Here's another snappy ukulele-enhanced tune by the teen Brit sensation, Rocky and Balls. George Formby would be proud of this duo.

Nothing more to say than what a hugely perfectly pretty happy baby!



She made me happy.

That's all.

coondoggie writes "Things don't look good for NASA when the report outlining its future begins: 'The US human spaceflight program appears to be on an unsustainable trajectory. [NASA] is perpetuating the perilous practice of pursuing goals that do not match allocated resources. Space operations are among the most complex and unforgiving pursuits ever undertaken by humans. It really is rocket science. Space operations become all the more difficult when means do not match aspirations.' Today the Augustine Commission handed to the White House the Review of US Human Space Flight Plans Committee summary report, after months of expert review and testimony. Many observers expected a bleak report, but ultimately the future of US manned space flight will hinge on how the report's conclusions are interpreted. Keep in mind too that NASA has spent almost $8 billion of a planned $40 billion to develop systems for a return to the Moon."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.