Conservative television dirtbag Glenn Beck, formerly of CNN, now of FOX, is none too happy with the domain name glennbeckrapedandmurderedayounggirlin1990.com (website is down). Beck's lawyers are attacking this satirical website, which has only been up for one week, on the grounds that the very domain name is defamation. That's right, the url, apart from the contents. Apparently the whole thing started with Fark and Gilbert Gottfried. I'm confused, but Ars Technica has an exensive post up: Can a mere domain name be defamation? Glenn Beck says yes (via @EFF)

An anonymous reader writes "Most people use MS filesystems on Disk-On-Keys, and portable hard drives, as these are readable from most machines. But this way you lose the files' permission information, which many times is very inconvenient (you must agree that having Ubuntu asking you whether to execute or display every text file or image you open from a DOK is annoying). Using 'regular' Linux filesystems like ext keeps the permissions, but may require using the superuser when switching machines (as the UIDs are different). So do any of you have a creative solution for this problem?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Seeed studio is designing what looks to be an ultra-portable digital storage oscilloscope, using the shell of a portable music player. Detailed specifications are questionably absent, however it looks like it has great potential. Has anyone hacked together something like this using a scavenged cell phone yet?

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Borders is running a coupon promotion for the next four days (until 9/14) offering $2 off any magazine they carry on their newsstand. So, if you haven't picked up the latest MAKE, our "Robots, Rovers, and Drones" issue, you can get $2 off at Borders with the coupon found on the link below.

Grab the coupon here.
Find out more about MAKE, Volume 19 here.

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I can't tell if these are creepy, adorable, stupid, awesome, or all of the above. But because I can't tell, I am compelled to blog. Above, Lili the pug doing Padmasana, the lotus position. Yoga Dogs (via KodakCB)

Hubble telescope's latest images, gorgeous!

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eldavojohn writes "Yesterday we covered Microsoft's jabs at the Google book deal, but today Reuters is reporting that the scanned books will be available to Google's rivals. Google said in a surprising statement, 'Google will host the digital (out-of-print) books online, and retailers such as Amazon, Barnes & Noble or your local bookstore will be able to sell access to users on any Internet-connected device they choose.' They made this statement today at the US House of Representatives Judiciary Committee that had been called to discuss criticism of a 2008 settlement between the Authors Guild and Google. Well, I would bet this has caught more than a few people by surprise. The Authors Guild offers a history and the fine print of the agreement."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This is a frequently asked question.

If you're doing a cloud-aware app, a feed reader, skimmer or aggregator of any flavor or genre, you need feeds to test with. That was an issue a few weeks ago, but today it's not an issue at all. There's a huge variety of cloud-aware feeds updating all the time, for you to test with.

The original feed is one of mine that's announcing three new states every 15 minutes, day and night rain or shine. Not very interesting, but quite reliable.

Then there are the cloud-enabled feeds I've created from the people I follow on Twitter. Robert Scoble is the Old Faithful of this class. He's updating a lot, all the time. I have a changes.xml for all of these feeds, so you can see who's been updating.

Any of my feeds will also show up on the log page on my server, as will your registration. If you're not getting through you won't see anything there. It's very important for debugging.

And the new exciting way to generate a test feed is to create a wordpress.com blog, and post to it. Your feed has a cloud element and it will notify your app when you update. You control when it updates, so this makes it easy for testing.

InBerkeley.com, a Wordpress blog we host ourselves is cloud-enabled.

The feed for Scripting News is cloud-enabled as is the feed for Rebooting The News and Bad Hair Day.

Of course you should refer to the Implementor's Guide as you implement.

And finally, the punchline, the reason for all this michegas -- CNN has the first real news feed that's cloud-enabled. And it's a gem. When I got this one running in River2, I had to stop and pause and say, we got there.

Above, video of a glass sculpture of the AIDS virus being created by glass blower Kim George, designed by artist Luke Jerram. London's Smithfield Gallery is hosting an exhibit of Jerram's glass renderings of deadly microbials from Sep 22-Oct 3. The show is called "Virology." Snip:

The question of pseudo-colouring in biomedicine and its use for science communicative purposes, is a vast and complex subject. If some images are coloured for scientific purposes, and others altered simply for aesthetic reasons, how can a viewer tell the difference? How many people believe viruses are brightly coloured? Are there any colour conventions and what kind of 'presence' do pseudocoloured images have that 'naturally' coloured specimens don't? See these examples of HIV imagery. How does the choice of different colours affect their reception?

The sculptures were designed in consultation with virologists from the University of Bristol using a combination of different scientific photographs and models.

Below: a most elegant representation of Swine Flu, from this series.

Glass Microbiology (lukejerram.com, via Book of Joe, thanks Joe!)

In our recent discussion about another bad idea for a new type of DRM that will surely fail, Steve R. pointed us to an article in Forbes about Intertrust, the DRM company, who apparently is cooking up yet another DRM scheme. But, unlike the system we talked about in the original post -- where the guy noted that the concept had to be widely adopted as a standard, and not protected, Intertrust goes on and on and on about how it's got a ton of DRM patents to protect this new DRM scheme. This isn't a surprise. Intertrust's entire business model was based on suing Microsoft for patent infringement.

And, of course, it should be no surprise that a company that thinks DRM makes sense also believes in the patenting the crap out of everything. But it's quite telling that even the way Forbes describes the company, it's the patents that come first, ahead of the DRM:

Talal Shamoon, chief executive of Intertrust Technologies in Sunnyvale, Calif., believes he has an answer. Intertrust holds a treasure trove of patents that help content owners manage digital rights; it has spent five years and tens of millions of dollars developing a standard called Marlin, which aims to keep content secure in a way that legitimate consumers won't find offensive

If you're leading with your patents, you don't have a good product. It's that simple. Meanwhile, the article goes on and on about just how many patents Intertrust has, and doesn't actually get around to describing "Marlin" until many paragraphs later. It doesn't sound particularly unique or special. Basically, it's still DRM that allows you to make limited copies. Yippee.

But, really, the most stunning line in the whole article is this lovely gem:

"I think it's un-American to think that patents are bad."

That's from Intertrust's CEO. It's quite a statement given the tons of evidence that patents have been a net negative on innovation and a massive waste of resources for most tech companies. It's un-American to want innovation to move faster? It's un-American to think that companies shouldn't be throwing money away on protectionist schemes? I'd love to better understand how. The purpose of the patent system is not to create more patents, it's "to promote the progress." If evidence suggests patents are not doing that, how is it possibly "un-American" to complain about that and try to change things?

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German makers Johannes Tsopanides and Johanna Spath have created a series of unique speakers that are designed by recording the information of your 33 most-played songs, then printed on a 3D printer.

What would your music taste look like as an object? Cloudspeaker is a conceptual work to create loudspeakers that reflect the music taste of their owner via 3d printing. Nowadays listening to music over the computer is common. Information on what kind of music you like can be saved, evaluated and summed up in tags. Our concept uses this information and shapes it into your individualised loudspeaker.

The tags of most played music and a 10sec frequency spectrum of the 33 favourite songs has an impact on the shape of the body. To value the tags we categorized all common music styles regarding the parameters loud-silent, calm-vivid and soft-hard on a scale from 0-10 which then parametrically build the body.

See the Cloudspeaker project description for more information.

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J. Dzhugashvili writes "Whereas most current graphics cards can only drive a pair of displays, AMD has put some special sauce in its next-generation DirectX 11 GPUs to enable support for a whopping six monitors. There's no catch about supported resolutions, either. At an event yesterday, AMD demonstrated a single next-gen Radeon driving six 30" Dell monitors, each with a resolution of 2560x1600, hooked up via DisplayPort. Total resolution: 7680x3200 (or 24.6 megapixels). AMD's drivers present this setup as a single monitor to Windows, so in theory, games don't need to be updated to support it. AMD showed off Dead Space, Left 4 Dead, World of Warcraft, and DiRT 2 running at playable frame rates on the six displays."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

We've posted about Danish sculpture Henrik Menné's work before, but I just can't get enough. His machines deposit low-melting materials like glue and wax using fans and heating elements, blowing or dripping the materials to create interesting forms over time. Contributing Writer Matt Mets saw some of his work in Pittsburgh this summer and took the above images.

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It's no secret that most of the traditional "recording industry" really is structured almost entirely to help the big name acts, but whenever we write about the collections organizations like ASCAP and BMI we get angry people sending in emails and comments insisting that it's unfair to lump those two in with the RIAA, since they're really out to help the actual musicians, even the small guys. Uh huh. Of course, we've already shown how ASCAP and BMI and their overly aggressive attempts to collect royalties from just about everywhere actually have been known to harm up-and-coming singers, such as by destroying the ability for many venues to host open mic nights. ASCAP has been particularly aggressive lately in making bizarre claims about how embedding YouTube videos requires a license (despite the fact YouTube already pays ASCAP -- so it wants to double count) and how ringtones represent a public performance. These are pure money grabs that make it that much more difficult for anyone to help promote up-and-coming musicians and songwriters. Is it any wonder, in the meantime, that the organization is spending time setting up efforts to try to push back against people who support open culture and content sharing? It apparently would prefer that the songwriters they "represent" not know about these efforts that actually do quite a bit to harm the vast majority of songwriters out there.

But, back to the original point. ASCAP, BMI and their supporters insist that they're not as bad as the big, mean RIAA, and that they're especially focused on providing important royalties to less well known artists. Except... even that may be questionable, at least when it comes to live performance royalties (admittedly, a smaller segment of overall royalties). Reader btr1701 sent in some email exchanges from a mailing list, which I won't share directly since I don't have approval, concerning a jazz musician trying to find out why she doesn't receive any live performance royalties, despite knowing that these organizations collect them, supposedly on her behalf. In response, she's told that ASCAP and BMI only distribute that royalty money to "the top 200 grossing US tours of the year." If you're smaller than that? Too bad. Except... they do have one minor exception. If you play "serious music" (no joke), then they'll pay you your royalties. So, the musician asks what is "serious music" and is told it's "generally considered to be classical music."

The musician tried re-registering her own (jazz) compositions as "serious music" but it "does not appear to have made any difference whatsoever" and she notes that she is "yet to receive a single penny... for any US performance or radio broadcast of any kind" despite the fact that her music has been performed in the US for almost ten years, and "the vast majority of performances of my music take place in the US."

I went looking for some more details, and it appears that, indeed, ASCAP and BMI have a policy in place to only provide performance royalties to the top 200 grossing tours in the US. If you're a "smaller" act, the only way to get paid is to be an opening act on such a tour. Otherwise? Too bad, you're on your own. Aren't you glad you signed with ASCAP or BMI?

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itwbennett writes "Answer a few questions about your personal Internet use, and a new tool from Symantec will calculate your net worth on the black market. You'll get three results: how much your online assets are worth, how much your online identity would sell for on the black market, and your risk of becoming a victim of identity theft. The tool is intended to raise consumer awareness about cybercrime, said Marian Merritt, Internet security advocate for Symantec. It's unlikely the average consumer would read an Internet Security Threat Report, she added, but a simply illustrated example might get the same point across. 'It's shocking how little value criminals place on your credit card,' she said."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Giancarlo Todone writes to tell us about his homebrew solution for converting an old keyboard to MIDI. The project is especially nice because he went beyond the standard on/off key detection, and added full velocity sensitivity for the keys. This means that the keyboard can detect how fast a key is pressed, allowing the keyboard to be played more expressively. Full schematics and source code are available on his website, however the writeup is in Italian.

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darthcamaro writes "Microsoft already had its own open source (OSI-approved) licenses, its own open source project hosting site and now it's adding its own non-profit open source foundation. That's right, the company that is still banging the patent drum against open source now has its own 501(c)(6) open source foundation. Officially called the CodePlex Foundation, it's a separate effort from the CodePlex site and is aimed at helping to get more commercial developers involved in open source. Considering how they continue to attack Linux and open source, will anyone take them seriously?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Cincinnati.com is selling commemorative mugs and other memorabilia emblazoned with the face of James Orr. As you may recall, he is the gentleman who ate the contents of his colostomy bag in a futile attempt to delay his trial for robbing and kidnapping a woman and forcing her to withdraw money from an ATM. (He was sentenced to 37 years today, which means he could be enjoying prison food until he's 103.)

James Orr mugs, photo puzzles, and photo aprons

Now this is funny. One of the undercurrent themes found in all of the "newspaper guy blaming Google for newspaper demise" stories is the idea that Google should also come to the rescue of newspapers. Usually, this means by just forking over some of its massive profits, but other times it's based on odd claims that Google has a responsibility to create the new business model for journalism. Well, it appears that Google is stepping into that breach... but it strikes me as an elaborate practical joke. That's because Google has alerted the newspaper world that it's working on a micropayment solution via its seldom-used Google Checkout offering, that could be used as a form of a paywall. Of course, we've been waiting for newspapers to actually offer just such a paywall, so that we can watch it fail and get on with our lives. Perhaps I'm way too cynical on this particular move by Google, but it strikes me as Google handing newspaper execs the rope with which to hang themselves. The problem with a paywall isn't that the technology doesn't exist to make it work -- it's that consumers won't buy into it. But, if the newspapers want to try -- and Google wants to provide the rope -- good for them.

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MAKE subscriber Bill Burnard points out this poor bot recently spotted accepting donations at DragonCon. Seems it's hard times for bots as well :/ Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Robotics | Digg this!

Serenissima writes "Researcher Judy Wall is experimenting with bacteria that can cleanse the radioactivity from toxic areas by rendering the heavy metals into non-toxic, inert versions. The technology is not without its flaws (the bacteria can't exist in an oxygenated environment yet), but it does have the potential to cleanse some of the world's hazardous sites. From the article: 'The bacteria Wall is studying are bio-corrosives and can change the solubility of heavy metals. They can take uranium and convert it to uraninite, a nearly insoluble substance.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Artist Luke Jarram makes these gorgeous models of microorganisms and infectious particles in hand-blown glass.

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_n3o_ put the shell from a classic (but busted) Gameboy to work as an enclosure for a 2.5" hard disk. That surprisingly convincing LCD is actually a paper printout set behind the GB's original screen - and sadly the disconnected buttons don't perform any tricks. A thorough tour of the case's innards can be seen over at Hack a Day
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Joshua writes "JAXA, Japan's version of NASA, has scheduled the launch of its new rocket, the H-IIB, for September 11th, 2009. The rocket will be carrying up the first in a series of unmanned supply vessels for the ISS called the HTV. The new Japanese addition to the international space fleet comes as a huge welcome sign to NASA, who has scheduled the space shuttle to retire in 2010. The HTV will be able to transport vital supplies, equipment, and experiments to the ISS, a job that the US space shuttle has been doing largely up until now. Yearly launches for the H-II2 and HTV are scheduled between now and 2015. Until NASA can finish the next generation Ares I rocket, which isn't likely to be finished before 2017, taking astronauts into space and to the ISS will likely become the job of Russia."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Joshua writes "JAXA, Japan's version of NASA, has scheduled the launch of its new rocket, the H-IIB, for September 11th, 2009. The rocket will be carrying up the first in a series of unmanned supply vessels for the ISS called the HTV. The new Japanese addition to the international space fleet comes as a huge welcome sign to NASA, who has scheduled the space shuttle to retire in 2010. The HTV will be able to transport vital supplies, equipment, and experiments to the ISS, a job that the U.S. space shuttle has been doing largely up until now. Yearly launches for the H-II2 and HTV are scheduled between now and 2015. Until NASA can finish the next generation Ares I rocket, which isn't likely to be finished before 2017, taking astronauts into space and to the ISS will likely become the job of Russia."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

We recently noted that a tiny percentage of the news coverage about healthcare were actually about the healthcare system. Instead, most articles were about the politics and the protests. On top of that, we've noted the silly games used by cable news hosts to draw attention to stories when there isn't anything behind them. Romenesko points us to a story, by Mark Bowden in The Atlantic, that combines both of these things, talking about how journalism today often seems to mean the quest for ammunition, rather than the quest for information.

The article focuses on the news coverage of Sonia Sotomayor's nomination to the Supreme Court -- and how most of the news focused on two out-of-context quotes that Sotomayor made in addresses to college students years ago. Bowden does a decent job noting that much of the work that digs up these sorts of things is done by political operatives, not journalists, but he doesn't do much to actually fault the mainstream press for making those hit pieces "the story." Instead, he oddly talks up the fact that pretty much all of the news coverage (both cable and network news) focused on these same pieces dug up by bloggers, and then spends a lot of time suggesting that the problem here is the bloggers:

I would describe their approach as post-journalistic. It sees democracy, by definition, as perpetual political battle. The blogger's role is to help his side. Distortions and inaccuracies, lapses of judgment, the absence of context, all of these things matter only a little, because they are committed by both sides, and tend to come out a wash. Nobody is actually right about anything, no matter how certain they pretend to be. The truth is something that emerges from the cauldron of debate. No, not the truth: victory, because winning is way more important than being right. Power is the highest achievement. There is nothing new about this. But we never used to mistake it for journalism. Today it is rapidly replacing journalism, leading us toward a world where all information is spun, and where all "news" is unapologetically propaganda.

In this post-journalistic world, the model for all national debate becomes the trial, where adversaries face off, representing opposing points of view. We accept the harshness of this process because the consequences in a courtroom are so stark; trials are about assigning guilt or responsibility for harm. There is very little wiggle room in such a confrontation, very little room for compromise--only innocence or degrees of guilt or responsibility. But isn't this model unduly harsh for political debate? Isn't there, in fact, middle ground in most public disputes? Isn't the art of politics finding that middle ground, weighing the public good against factional priorities? Without journalism, the public good is viewed only through a partisan lens, and politics becomes blood sport.

I agree with most of that last paragraph entirely -- but it strikes me that this issue is seen much more commonly in the mainstream press than elsewhere. Elsewhere, I often find thoughtful discussions and debates and compromises. I see discussions aimed at getting to truth, rather than just "winning." So why not explore where those conversations are happening, rather than complaining about the fact that it doesn't seem to be happening in post-journalistic news? I would think that the missing piece to the article is that there's a real void in the mainstream press coverage where reporters (bloggers or paid professionals) actually present things fairly and look for reasoned argument and facts -- rather than hit pieces. Unfortunately, we're not seeing that at all.

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If you're in New York, you might be interested in Usman Haque's lecture at Parsons Art, Media, and Technology Lab:

Vast, floating clouds of helium balloons illuminated by LEDs—whose color you can change by calling them on your cell?! Floating skyscraper silhouettes held down by hundreds of people whose collective force modulates the light bubbling up the structure. An immense fountains on a beach brilliantly lit from within by visualizations of hundreds of thousands of vistors’s voices. Who did these things? Usman Haque.

When: Wednesday September 16 2009, 6:30pm

Where: Parsons the New School for Design, 2 W 13th St. 10th Floor

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CrazyCanucklehead writes "Security Researcher Michael Sutton discusses his findings when looking at the advertised anti-phishing features in the recently released iPhone OS 3.1. It turns out that the protection is far less than what is provided in OS X and the feature may not provide any protection at all."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Here's a scene from American Casino, a new documentary about the subprime lending scandal and the resulting $12 trillion Wall Street bailout. Another consequence of the meltdown -- the swimming pools of foreclosed homes have become mosquito breeding grounds.

How Foreclosures Breed Mosquitoes

Bibliodyssey, a blog that scans and posts illustrations from old books, has a nice gallery of bee related images.

Illustration above is from Leben und Zucht der Honigbiene - ein gemeinverständliches Lehrbuch über Behandlung der Bienen und über Tätigkeit, Nutzen und Anatomie der Biene 1922 by Oskar Krancher. Old bee book illustrations

netbuzz writes "Guy kicks up a fuss at a Massachusetts car-repair shop, employees call the police, guy allegedly gives them a hard time, too, and they charge the fellow with a variety of expectable charges: disorderly conduct, resisting arrest ... and 'unlawful wiretapping and possessing a device for wiretapping.' The device? A digital voice recorder. Massachusetts is one of only 12 states that prohibit the recording of a conversation unless all parties to it are aware it's being recorded."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

netbuzz writes "Guy kicks up a fuss at a Massachusetts car-repair shop, employees call the police, guy allegedly gives them a hard time, too, and they charge the fellow with a variety of expectable charges: disorderly conduct, resisting arrest... and "unlawful wiretapping and possessing a device for wiretapping." The device? A digital voice recorder. Massachusetts is one of only 12 states that prohibit the recording of a conversation unless all parties to it are aware it's being recorded."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Mockingbird writes "I've posted the full text of Lord Kames's opinion in the important Scottish Sessions case of Hinton v. Donaldson from 1773. This was the case that rejected for Scotland, by a vote of 11-to-1, the theory of "common law copyright", that authors (meaning, in practice, publishers) had a perpetual copyright, at common law, of their writings. It was followed a few months later by the English House of Lords's decision in Donaldson v. Beckett, in which the English Lords rejected just as forcefully the claim that authors had perpetual copyright under the common law of England.

Of the twelve Sessions Lords who decided the case, ten issued opinions. Lord Kames's is one of the longer ones, and one of the most famous. Kames builds his case on principles of common law, property law, and commercial law, and finds the claim of "common law copyright" to be inconsistent with the principles of all these areas of law:

this claim, far from being founded on property, is inconsistent with it. The privilege an author has by statute, is known to all the world. But I purchase a book not entered in Stationer's hall; does it not become my property? I see a curious machine, the fire engine, for example. I carry it away in my memory, and construct another by it. Is not that machine, the work of my own hand, my property? I buy a curious picture, is there any thing to bar me from giving copies without end? It is a rule in all laws, that the commerce of moveables ought to be free; and yet, according to the pursuer's doctrine, the property of moveables may be subjected to endless limitations and restrictions that hitherto have not been thought of, and would render the commerce of moveables extremely hazardous. At any rate, the author of avery wise or witty saying, uttered even in conversation, has a monopoly of it; and no man is at liberty to repeat it.

Lastly, I shall consider a perpetual monopoly in a commercial view. The act of Queen Anne is contrived with great judgement, not only for the benefit of authors, but for the benefit of learning in general. It excites men of genius to exert their talents for composition; and it multiplies books both of instruction and amusement. And when, upon expiration of the monopoly, the commerce of these books is laid open to all, their cheapness, from a concurrence of many editors, is singularly beneficial to the public. Attend, on the other hand, to the consequences of a perpetual monopoly. Like all other monopolies, it will unavoidably raise the price of good books beyond the reach of ordinary readers. They will be sold like so many valuable pictures..... [the] booksellers, by grasping too much, would lose their trade altogether; and men of genius would be quite discouraged from writing, as no price can be afforded for an unfashionable commodity. In a word, I have no difficulty to maintain that a perpetual monopoly of books would prove more destructive to learning, and even to authors, than a second irruption of Goths and Vandals. "

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dreemteem writes "Twitter co-founder Biz Stone told reporters in Mexico City this week that the company expects to add revenue-generating features to the micro-blogging site in the fourth quarter, according to a report from Bloomberg.com."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

dreemteem writes "Twitter co-founder Biz Stone told reporters in Mexico City this week that the company expects to add revenue generating features to the micro-blogging site in the fourth quarter, according to a report from Bloomberg.com."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

As we have reported before, the idea of an airless tire (or "tweel") is at least as old as the 1930s. Still, these photos of prototype non-pneumatic tires under development for the US military by Resilient Technologies, LLC, are pretty sick. Gimme!

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Tickets for the second installment of Pop-Up Magazine, a live event on Sept. 25 in San Francisco, go on sale today at 12 noon PST.

What is Pop-Up?

A 75-minute reading/performance highlighting two dozen writers, photographers and filmmakers whose work appears in places like Wired, This American Life, New York Times Magazine, New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly and Harper's. The evening is structured just like a magazine: short front-of-the-book bits, reviews, essays, columns, mini-features, photo essays, and features.

Issue 1, which debuted last spring, featured Michael Pollan, the Kitchen Sisters, Larry Sultan, Todd Lappin, Lisa Margonelli and more. While I can't reveal Issue 2's lineup, I will mention that once again I've been handed the Gallagher slot — i.e. the gadget portion of Pop-Up.

Tickets sold out fast last time. If you want to attend this intimate event at San Francisco's Brava Theater on Friday, Sept. 25 at 7pm, then I recommend you head on over to Pop-Up Magazine today at, or soon after, 12 noon PST. Tickets are $15. Oh, and If you do attend please be sure to come say hi after the show!

consonant writes "A Delaware District Court judge has ordered Facebook to turn over ALL its source code to Leader Technologies, who allege patent infringements by Facebook. The patent in question appears to be for 'associating a piece of data with multiple categories.' Additionally, while the judge in question deems it fine to let Leader Technologies look at Facebook's source (for a patent, no less!) in its entirety for a single feature, it would be 'overboard to ask a patent holder to disclose all of their products that practice any claim of the patent-in-suit.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

consonant writes "A Delaware District Court judge has ordered Facebook to turn over ALL its source code to Leader Technologies, who allege patent infringements by Facebook. The patent in question appears to be for "associating a piece of data with multiple categories". Additionally, while the judge in question deems it fine to let Leader Technologies look at Facebook's source (for a patent, no less!) in its entirety for a single feature, it would be "overboard to ask a patent holder to disclose all of their products that practice any claim of the patent-in-suit"."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The UK police watchdog is finally looking into the widespread use of anti-terrorism stop-and-search powers by cops. The event that spurred them into it? Two plainclothes cops stopped a 43-year-old man and his 11-year-old daughter and her six-year-old friend. They took the man's USB sticks, phones, camera and CD, made him stand in front of a CCTV to be photographed, and then they searched and photographed the children.

They never told the man where he could go to get his property returned. They never returned it. Where I come from, that's called "being mugged."

The Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) said todayit would "manage" the investigation into the incident in July, meaning that an independent investigator will control the inquiry conducted by the Met's Directorate of Professional Standards...

In a statement today, the IPCC said: "The complainant states that, when he asked under what legislation his property was being seized, he was told it was under section 44 of the Terrorism Act 2000. He also complained that he was given no information as to when he could retrieve his goods or who to contact in order to do so, and that there was no communication from police despite assurances that he would be told when he could collect his things."

Police investigated over stop and search of man and children under terror law

diegocgteleline.es writes "The Linux kernel v2.6.31 has been released. Besides the desktop improvements and USB 3.0 support mentioned some days ago, there is an equivalent of FUSE for character devices that can be used for proxying OSS sound through ALSA, new tools for using hardware performance counters, readahead improvements, ATI Radeon KMS, Intel's Wireless Multicomm 3200 support, gcov support, a memory checker and a memory leak detector, a reimplementation of inotify and dnotify on top of a new filesystem notification infrastructure, btrfs improvements, support for IEEE 802.15.4, IPv4 over Firewire, new drivers and small improvements. The full list of changes can be found here."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Acephalous's DISTANCE LEARNING! is a notional Zork-like game that illustrates the daily round of a distance education instructor:

You are sitting at your desk with a cup of coffee, checking your online course webpage. There are twenty-three assignments that need grading.

> drink coffee

All is right with the world again.

> grade assignments

You have graded twenty-three assignments. You are sitting at your desk with a half-finished cup of coffee, checking your online course webpage. There are twenty-three assignments that need grading.

> drink more coffee

You curse the law of diminishing returns.

> grade assignments

You have graded twenty-three assignments. You are sitting at your desk with an empty cup of coffee, checking your online course webpage. There are twenty-three assignments that need grading.

> no all done

There are twenty-three assignments that need grading.

DISTANCE LEARNING! (via Uncertain Principles)

A South African IT company got so fed up with the national telco's notoriously poor Internet service that they decided to set up a race that pitted the telco's network against a carrier pigeon. The pigeon won.

Now, this is very funny, but I think that over pigeon-traversable distances in which latency isn't an issue, the pigeon will always win. A random web-page promises that a carrier pigeon can bear loads of up to 1.7 oz or about 48.2g. My postal scale says that my 64GB SD card weighs 2.05g. Which means that a pigeon could carry 23 64GB SD cards, or 1.472 terabytes. In the Telkom race, the pigeon traversed 40km in 2 hours.

I think that even the best commercial ISP in the world would be hard-pressed to deliver 736GB/h between two customer DSL end-points. Likewise, I think that even the greatest pigeon on the world would be hard-pressed to deliver even one bit of information from Cape Town to New York.

A Durban IT company pitted an 11-month-old bird armed with a 4GB memory stick against the ADSL service from the country's biggest web firm, Telkom.

Winston the pigeon took two hours to carry the data 60 miles - in the same time the ADSL had sent 4% of the data.

Telkom said it was not responsible for the firm's slow internet speeds.

The idea for the race came when a member of staff at Unlimited IT complained about the speed of data transmission on ADSL.

He said it would be faster by carrier pigeon.

"We renown ourselves on being innovative, so we decided to test that statement," Unlimited's Kevin Rolfe told the Beeld newspaper.

SA pigeon 'faster than broadband' (via Engadget)

Poking a hole in his commercial iPhone window mount with a Dremel tool was all it took for Tim Cox to be the proud owner of a brand new dash cam. Goes to show that not all good hacks need to be complicated. Sometimes all it takes is finding the right spot and poking a hole to see what's on the other side.

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inject_hotmail.com writes "The results are in: it's faster to send your data via an airborne carrier than it is through the pipes. As discussed Tuesday, a company in South Africa called Unlimited IT, frustrated by terribly slow Internet speeds, decided to prove their point by sending an actual homing pigeon with a "data card" strapped to its leg from one of their offices to another while at the same time uploading the same amount of data to the same destination via their ISPs data lines. The media outlet reporting this triumph said that it took the pigeon just over 1 hour to make the 80km/50mile flight, whereas it took over 2 hours to transfer just 4% of that data."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

inject_hotmail.com writes "The results are in: it's faster to send your data via an airborne carrier than it is through the pipes. As discussed Tuesday, a company in South Africa called Unlimited IT, frustrated by terribly slow Internet speeds, decided to prove their point by sending an actual homing pigeon with a "data card" strapped to its leg from one of their offices to another while at the same time uploading the same amount of data to the same destination via their ISPs data lines. The media outlet reporting this triumph said that it took the pigeon just over 1 hour to make the 80km/50mile flight, whereas it took over 2 hours to transfer just 4% of that data."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

While I can understand some of the interest in ebooks, one of the things I haven't quite understood was the effort to focus on making ebooks more like regular books. In the history of "killer apps," the one thing that tends to stand out is that they show up when the new technology allows something new that couldn't be done before. Simply mimicking the old on a new platform isn't a recipe for widespread success. And, sure, ebooks can let you store a lot of books on a single device, or take notes, but they haven't really taken advantage of what the technology could enable.

David Thomson points us to an interesting ebook experiment involving singer and novelist Nick Cave, who has created an ebook for the iPhone, that involves a whole lot more. Beyond just the text, there are both the audio and video versions of Cave reading along -- and that includes some music that goes with the book as well. Plus, it includes a "news feed" though it's not clear what's in it. The pricing still seems a bit expensive ($25), but it's great to at least see some experimenting with what the technology should allow.

One other interesting tidbit: it wasn't Cave who came up with the idea, but his publisher who really pushed to make the ebook into something more, and roped Cave into agreeing to add the extra stuff. It's nice to see that at least some of the middlemen providers are looking to step up and take charge, rather than just leaving it all to the content creators.

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Evan Grant gives a brief talk covering the basics of cymatics including some a few historical figures who studied the interaction of sound & matter. Some interesting ideas are proposed in the resulting comment thread over at the TED site. Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Science | Digg this!

Alison Beasley sends word that GaiKai, the cloud gaming service being developed by games industry vet Dave Perry, is about to begin beta testing in Europe. (Sign-up page.) GaiKai is a competitor to OnLive, which started beta tests of its own recently. IGN got a chance to try out GaiKai for themselves, and they've posted a video showing how it performed. From Perry's announcement: "Our closed beta has two goals. #1 is to bring our servers to their knees so we can choose the final configuration before we start ordering large quantities of them. (We think we have it worked out, but you can be certain our staff will be swapping cards and testing different processors as each day goes by.) Goal #2 is to test older computers. We've had lots of emails from people describing their computers and 99% of them have ample performance. Remember you don't even need a 3D card to see a 3D game run on our service. I know this is strangely counter to what people expect, but we actually want to get plenty of basic office-grade XP machines testing so we can make sure we can reach the widest audience possible. ... After we choose the hardware configuration in Europe, our next phase will be our USA Nationwide Network Test, that will be using 8 Tier-1 Data Centers, getting hammered by Closed Beta testers. During that process, will be identifying the other data centers we need to include to blanket the USA in a low latency array. Phase 2 of that is Europe, in exactly the same test."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

eldavojohn writes "With authors, scholars, the DoJ and publishers ripping apart the Google book deal, it's Microsoft's turn. They're claiming it's frankly an illegal 'joint venture' and not a settlement. According to ZDNet, Microsoft's four complaints against the deal are: 1) Future infringements are covered by the settlement, affecting the exclusive rights of absent class members for the life of their copyrights. 2) The deal gives away to Google vast rights that were not contested in the underlying litigation. The lawsuits dealt with Google's displaying brief excerpts. Instead of compromising on that infringement, the parties instead agreed to give away the rights to display entire books. 3) The publishers who negotiated this deal each have undisclosed side deals with Google, which will likely give them better terms than the class will get. 4) The publishers plan to exclude their own works from the deal. You might recall over a year ago Microsoft's own scanning effort died."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Last year, we wrote about an odd patent lawsuit brought against Facebook by a company called Leader Technology. What was odd was that Facebook didn't seem like an obvious target for the patent (7,139,761) about associating a piece of data with multiple categories (and, actually why the idea that associating a piece of data with multiple categories should be patentable is another of life's mysteries). We actually thought it was more of a publicity stunt by Leader Technologies, rather than a serious lawsuit. But, we were surprised last month when a judge actually ordered Facebook to turn over its source code as a part of the lawsuit. This didn't make much sense to us. The source code really should only matter if it was a copyright infringement suit, not a patent one. Besides, why should Facebook turn over all of its source code over such a minor issue of associating a piece of data with multiple categories. At the very least, it should just be whatever part of the code that Leader believes is infringing.

Facebook objected to the ruling, but Ravish lets us know that the judge has denied Facebook and once again demanded the company hand over its entire source code. Even though Leader will only be able to view the source code under the watchful eye of Facebook representatives, it still seems quite extreme that a judge would require that Facebook reveal its entire source code to a company that is a competitor.

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Dr. Hok writes "As more and more renewable energy enters the grid, it gets increasingly difficult to match supply and demand 24/7. The answer of German power company Lichtblick and Volkswagen is a swarm of 100,000 flexible base-load generators. These fridge-sized CHP (Combined Heat and Power) generators that will be installed in people's basements in Hamburg starting early next year will feed electricity into the grid and the waste heat into their home's water/heating. The "ZuhauseKraftwerk" (HomePowerPlant) features a vanilla VW Golf natural-gas engine that generates 20kW electrical and 34 kW heat with an efficiency of 92%. The units are remotely controlled via a mobile network or DSL; they can ramp up in a minute if needed. A water tank ensures that heat is continuously available, while electricity is produced on demand. The swarm will replace two nuclear plants, they say. And your old oil heating needed replacement anyway."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Dr. Hok writes "As more and more renewable energy enters the grid, it gets increasingly difficult to match supply and demand 24/7. The answer of German power company Lichtblick and Volkswagen is a swarm of 100,000 flexible base load generators. These fridge-sized CHP (Combined Heat and Power) generators that will be installed in people's basements in Hamburg starting early next year feed electricity into the grid and the waste heat into their home's water/heating. The "ZuhauseKraftwerk" (HomePowerPlant) features a vanilla VW Golf natural-gas engine that generates 20kW electrical and 34 kW heat with an efficiency of 92%. The units are remotely controlled via a mobile network or DSL, they can ramp up in a minute if needed. A water tank ensures that heat is continuously available, while electricity is produced on demand. The swarm will replace two nuclear plants, they say. And your old oil heating that needed replacement anyway."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Back in July, Michael Duvall, a second-term California assemblyman who "is the vice-chairman of the legislature's commerce committee and a member of its ethics committee, are married with two children and are known as a staunch defender of conservative family values" was to appear on a televised committee meeting. Not realizing his mic was already live, he began to brag about his sexual conquests.

Make sure your microphone is OFF before bragging about and giving disgustingly lewd details of your affair with a much younger woman who is also a lobbyist whose clients have business before your committee, and also laughing about the fact that you are simultaneously cheating on your wife and your mistress with yet another woman...

Not content with mentioning the fact he was having an affair, which would have caused problems enough, Duvall -- who I am now officially christening "Open Mike" -- launched into explicit details, many of which are too nasty to reprint here, and all of which were captured by his microphone. (Among them: tiny underwear, spankings, and the 19-year-age difference....

It gets better:

"She wears little eye-patch underwear," said Duvall, who is married with two children. "So, the other day she came here with her underwear, Thursday. And? so, we had made love Wednesday--a lot! And so she'll, she's all, 'I am going ?up and down the stairs, and you're dripping out of me!' So messy!"...

During his political career, Duvall has unabashedly espoused conservative? principles and is known as a partisan Republican with a knack for theatrics:? He has noisily driven his Harley-Davidson motorcycle to functions. In 2008, ?Duvall blasted efforts to condone gay marriage. Legislatively, he has ?proposed bills to aid the insurance industry and government contractors ?feeding off the state's massive transportation kitty.

? He has offered a law to alter the First Amendment rights of Americans by? banning anti-war activists from putting the names of fallen soldiers on ?T-shirts with messages such as "Bush lied" on the front and "They died" on the back; he observed that the dead soldiers fought to protect freedom, and "opportunists" should not be allowed to "exploit" the sacrifices with political messages opposing war.?

Such thinking impressed certain constituencies. Earlier this year, the man who never graduated from high school received "100 percent" approval scores ?by the California Republican Assembly, the state's leading conservative outfit, and the Capitol Resource Institute (CRI), a fierce guardian of traditional family values.?

And best of all? He's refusing to resign (though he's taken to actually running away from reporters).

Open Mike Likely to Close Out Legislator's Career

OC Assemblyman In Bed With Lobbyist . . . No, Literally In Bed

Update: He resigned.

Pablo from Tor.com sez:

It's a big week for Tor.com! We're proud to announce the immediate availability of David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer's definitive anthology, Year's Best Fantasy 9.

This highly anticipated release also marks something we're particularly proud of: Tor.com's debut as a publishing entity, distinct from Tor Books and as a separate imprint under our shared corporate overlords at Macmillan.

YBF 9 is available only as a print-on-demand book, in keeping with our mission of exploring alternative forms of publishing. Similar to the launch of the Tor.com Store and the serialization of Cory Doctorow's Makers, this title is one of our various publishing projects that seek to experiment with the available alternatives to publishing's traditional sales, distribution, and delivery mechanisms.

Announcing Year's Best Fantasy 9 (Thanks, Pablo!)

Michael Hansmeyer's Platonic Solids uses clever and simple recombined algorithms to create beautiful art.

??In this project we explore three-dimensional subdivision algorithms. These have traditionally been used in computer graphics to produce smooth, rounded forms from coarse polygons. By modifying and expanding these established algorithms to include additional weights, one can generate forms with entirely different attributes. By varying the process' parameters, we are able to affect a form's topography, its curvature, its degree of branching, and on a further level its surface attributes. We recursively apply the subdivision process to a source form, which we restrict to one of the five platonic solids. These basic forms allow us to concentrate entirely on the scope of output inherent in the single generative process.

??Many of the forms produced by our subdivision process appear plant-like and resemble organisms. Some have similarities with radiolaria depicted in Ernst Häckel's Kunstformen der Natur. Different combinations of parameters, however, produce entirely new forms unlike those seen in nature. In both cases the forms' geometric complexity is produced by an extremely simple and transparent process. The forms are thus entirely traceable and malleable.??

Platonic Solids (via Beyond the Beyond)

Earlier this year, we wrote about how Toyota had been stockpiling a ton of patents around hybrid vehicle technology, such that almost no other carmaker could make hybrid vehicles without paying up. Of course, there was some history to that story, as Toyota had lost a big lawsuit by a patent holder named Paice a few years back, requiring a fee to be paid on a bunch of Toyota hybrids. However, apparently that wasn't enough. Gary points out that, not only has Paice filed some new lawsuits over more recent hybrid Toyotas, it's also taking a separate crack at the issue via the International Trade Commission (ITC), an infamous loophole used by patent holders to get multiple cracks at a company over the same patent. The link above from Treehugger asks a question that plenty of folks following the patent world have been asking for years:

Here's a bit of a kicker: With the last suit, "Paice said the market for hybrid cars "did not take off" until Toyota "revamped its vehicle program" with technology Paice patented almost a decade earlier." So if a company has a technology that could be a huge boon for drivers and the environment and they sit on it for a decade, does a competing company that finally does something with it and makes it a success really need to be sued repeatedly for using it? Paice seems to be somewhat at fault for not being effective enough with a smart technology.

Indeed. This isn't a case of patents being used to enable innovation. It's a clear case of patents being used to hinder innovation -- and the patent holder seems to have no qualms about admitting that no real innovation happened until Toyota came along.

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Steampunk maker Nifer Fahrion worked with Robynne Winchester of Tulgey Wood Designs to whip up this rugged, construction grade corset to wear at Burning Man with the Man KCrew:

To create this hybrid corset, I first chose a fabric consisting of same type of rugged cotton canvas found throughout the Carhartt line. Durable, practical, and breathable, the material allows me to get down and dirty with my hammer and drill without fear of damaging my corset.

Next it was important the corset be functional and versatile. I attached holsters for a hammer, drill, tape measure and pliers, as well as pockets to use for assorted needs while working.

All the tool holsters and pockets are attached to the corset with heavy-duty snaps allowing me to change the configuration according to my needs on the job site.

NifNaks - Rugged Femininity, my new work corset!: (Thanks, Jake!)

(Image: Nifer in her Carhart corset at Burning Man 2009)

Right now in New York City, Genesis Breyer P-Orridge is celebrating the opening of a new career-spanning art exhibition at the Invisible Exports Gallery. The exhibit, titled "30 Years Of Being Cut Up," presents Breyer P-Orridge's photomontage and Expanded Polaroids, from his early mail art to his latest visual explorations. Of course, the cut-up is a powerful creative tool of collage/montage used by the 20th century Surrealists and rediscovered in the 1950s by Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs, who applied the technique to fiction, film, and sound poetry. As Burroughs once said, "When you cut into the present, the future leaks out." In the early 1970s, P-Orridge became friends with Burroughs and Gysin and embarked on a fully immersive project to "cut up" his entire life. The musical expression of that can be heard in Gen's pioneering work in Psychic TV and Throbbing Gristle. And since the early 1990s, Gen collaborated with his wife and collaborator Lady Jaye Breyer to collage their identities into a single "pandrogynous" being. Lady Jaye tragically died last year, but their combined selves live on in Gen. This exhibition traces Gen's quest to break free from Control, in all its forms, by cutting up reality. We are delighted to present this preview of several pieces from 30 Years Of Being Cut Up. Please click on the images to see them larger. Genesis Breyer P-Orridge "30 Years Of Being Cut Up"

Johan Hybschmann made this amazing work in paper:

One of Johan's student projects, in particular, continues to astound me. What you're looking at in the images reproduced here (alongside Johan's answers to a series of questions I had posed over email) are painstakingly precise laser-cuts made into the pages of a blank sketchbook. As the book is opened and its pages begin to turn, these cuts work together to form a spatial representation of the single, highly choreographed 90-minute shot that is Alexander Sokurov's film Russian Ark. The book's "content" is thus a three-dimensional, perspectivally accurate space.

Find out more on BLDGBLOG. (Thanks, Tatia!)

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MAKE reader Connie writes in!

Dear MAKE, Last Thursday I had the honour of seeing artist Theo Jansen present his Animaris Umerus, one of the famed Strandbeests, in Zurich for his first exhibition in Switzerland. At the end of the (sold out) evening, I looked through my bag for something he could autograph. How appropriate that I had the latest issue of MAKE magazine. His creations are like wind powered robots, his method DIY, elegant engineering through modest materials and nervous sytems created through binary code. It was a perfect match! I waited afterwards until others finished their private questions and asked him to sign my issue. He complied without hesitation, flipping through your magazine admiring the "robots, rovers and drones". I thought that you might like to know :-) Attached some photos from the event & his autograph.

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A bunch of folks have been submitting this positively bizarre story of how publishing giant Conde Nast (who publishes, among other things, GQ, Vanity Fair, the New Yorker and Wired) basically tried to completely bury an investigative piece recently published in GQ about Vladimir Putin. Conde Nast basically tried to do everything possible to make sure that the article was not seen in Russia. Beyond the obvious things of not publishing it in Russian editions, it didn't put the article online and basically buried it within the US GQ issue it was published in. It's not mentioned on the cover at all.

Now, there have been plenty of reports about how journalists who have been critical of Putin have an odd history of dying young -- but it's not clear if the goal here was to protect the reporter (who's pissed off that this whole thing happened, and doesn't want CN protecting him). The bigger issue have been that the company feared how its Russian magazines would be treated following the profile. But, if that's the case, why do the report at all?

In the meantime, of course, with NPR breaking the story of how much trouble Conde Nast went to hide the article, they've pretty much guaranteed that the article gets just that much more attention in Russia.

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An anonymous reader writes "Dutch company Frame4 group is offering subscriptions for the Malware Distribution Project, a large security archive with a massive collection of downloadable malware and computer underground related information for the purposes of analysis, testing, research and development. Help Net Security has talked with the founder of the project and several other security researchers to get more details on this unique service."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

One of the best things about the maker community is being able to learn from other people's builds: what worked, what didn't. In MAKE Volume 14, maker Marque Cornblatt shared a DIY with us on the building of his Gomicycle, a Honda Rebel 250 motorcycle gone electric. A San Francisco resident, Cornblatt was seeking an urban commuter bike with lots of torque and pep. He started with plans for the "El Chopper ET," a Honda Rebel 250 project developed by motorcycle EV conversion guru John Bidwell. Since the plans were a bit dated, he adapted, redesigned, and took note. He scored a Honda Rebel 250 with a blown engine on Craigslist, and the rest of the build is documented in his DIY. Check out the full article in our Digital Edition, learn from Cornblatt's build, and design your own.

You can still pick up a back issue of MAKE Volume 14, the Optics issue, if you don't have it. Learn how to make an inexpensive but powerful digital microscope, a vintage-looking opaque projector, a cool kaleidoscope, a mesmerizing taffy pulling machine, a remote control dune buggy with a built-in video camera, a smoke ring cannon, a dollar-store parabolic microphone, and then some.

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A bunch of folks have been submitting the news that the "pro-linux" group the Open Invention Network recently purchased some former Microsoft patents via a third party. A few quick thoughts:

• It seems like a shame that money had to be spent by these groups just to protect themselves from lawsuits for developing useful software.
• Microsoft apparently refused to let OIN bid directly on the patents, leading to the middleman. This seems rather petty. If Microsoft really doesn't want the patents any more and isn't planning on doing anything with them, why not sell them to a pro-Linux group?
• If Microsoft had no problem getting rid of them, I'm guessing they're not among the couple of hundred patents Microsoft keeps insisting Linux violates, without ever actually naming any specific patents.

All in all, this is a pretty depressing story, showing money being wasted, rather than put to good use doing actual innovation.

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James writes in with this fun project he made to help him find his tent at a festival. I like the way he interfaced his indicator beacon to the cell phone. When the phone gets an incoming call, it lights up the screen, so he mounted a photoresistor right next to it. This allowed him to build a very simple analog circuit to control the whole thing. Nice hack!

If you used a pay-as-you phone for this, and hung up after a couple rings, it seems like this could be a really economical way to go.

This is what the completed project looks like:

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Over at Needles and Sins, Marisa Kakoulas DiMattia blogs:

Yesterday was the US launch of the racing game Dirt 2, and what better way to promote virtual off-road rallies than, ya know, a Flash app that lets you tattoo some woman's breasts. The app is called "Dirty Tats." And that's not even the worst part.

The obviously sex starved Codemasters who created the tattoo game know how to do creepy well, albeit unintentionally. After the intro of loud and just plain bad pop-metal, you're treated to gooey come-ons from a volumptuous vixen who purrs "I like the personal touch," or "Looks like you have some hidden talents." My special talent was not vomiting while trying to get the words "misogyny" across her chest via the Lettering tool.

And like all bad tattoo Flash games, there are the bad tattoo flash stencils that you can stick on her, like the Tribal fish and Kanji for "why am I wasted my time."

"Dirty Tats." The Game. The Tragedy. (Needles and Sins, thanks Susannah Breslin)

Earlier this year, NPR ran a neat narrated slideshow of astronomers discussing their favorite images of space taken through the Hubble Telescope. It's worth a second look, now that the device is back in action, following a final round of repairs. Above, holy wow, right? This image was one of the earlier images retreived after Hubble launched nearly 20 years ago. Astronomer Tod Lauer of the National Optical Astronomy Observatory in Tucson explains that it's a Hubble Space Telescope image of part of the Eagle Nebula, a giant cloud of gas and dust about six thousand light years from earth. These pillars are areas of strong concentrations of gas and dust, in which stars are eroded away, like sandcastles on a beach are blown away by waves. Inside this cloud, new stars are being formed.

Hubble's Prying Eyes (NPR News, via Jesse Dylan)

And, with that prelude out of the way -- go have a look at the new images NASA released today from the now-upgraded Hubble Telescope. Below, "Butterfly Emerges from Stellar Demise in Planetary Nebula NGC 6302."