The folks at The Register have gotten their hands on Sun's confidential roadmap from June, which outlines the company's plans for SPARC product lines. The chart has some basic technical details for the UltraSPARC T-series and the SPARC64 line. The long-anticipated "Rock" line is not mentioned. "We can expect a goosed SPARC64-VII+ chip any day now, which will run at 2.88 GHz and which will be a four-core, eight-threaded chip like its 'Jupiter' predecessor. This Jupiter+ chip is implemented in the same 65 nanometer process as the Jupiter chip was, and it is made by Fujitsu, a company that is in the process of outsourcing its chip manufacturing to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp. ... not only has Sun cut back on the threads with [the 2010 UltraSPARC model, codenamed Rainbow Falls], it has also cut back on the socket count, keeping it at the same four sockets used by the T5440 server. And instead of hitting something close to 2 GHz as it should be able to do as it shifts from a 65 nanometer to a 45 nanometer process in the middle of 2010, Sun is only telling customers that it can boost clock speeds to 1.67 GHz with Rainbow Falls."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The folks at The Register have gotten their hands on Sun's confidential roadmap from June, which outlines the company's plans for SPARC product lines. The chart has some basic technical details for the UltraSPARC T-series and the SPARC64 line. The long-anticipated "Rock" line is not mentioned. "We can expect a goosed SPARC64-VII+ chip any day now, which will run at 2.88 GHz and which will be a four-core, eight-threaded chip like its 'Jupiter' predecessor. This Jupiter+ chip is implemented in the same 65 nanometer process as the Jupiter chip was, and it is made by Fujitsu, a company that is in the process of outsourcing its chip manufacturing to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp. ... not only has Sun cut back on the threads with [the 2010 UltraSPARC model, codenamed Rainbow Falls], it has also cut back on the socket count, keeping it at the same four sockets used by the T5440 server. And instead of hitting something close to 2 GHz as it should be able to do as it shifts from a 65 nanometer to a 45 nanometer process in the middle of 2010, Sun is only telling customers that it can boost clock speeds to 1.67 GHz with Rainbow Falls."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

alphadogg writes "The IEEE has finally approved the 802.11n high-throughput wireless LAN standard. Bruce Kraemer, the long-time chairman of the 802.11n Task Group (part of the 802.11 Working Group, which oversees the WLAN standards), has sent out a notification to a listserv for task group members, which includes a wide range of Wi-Fi chip makers, software developers, and equipment vendors. A press release is available now as well. This process began in 2002."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Three years ago, we wrote about the "roller coaster" of indecency complaints to the FCC. Basically, there are very, very few indecency complaints, until one particular organization alerts its members to all complain at once. What's silly is that the FCC is often influenced by this, even though most of the people complaining never actually saw the TV content in question. What's even sillier is that the FCC apparently (very quietly) changed its process to make it easier for this group to stuff the ballots.

Let's start with constant FCC watcher, Matthew Lasar, who notes the latest roller coaster swing:

How come the latest stats, in this instance for the first quarter of this year, show the viewers relatively calm at 578 complaints in January, then 505 in February, followed by 179,997 in March?

179,997? Um, did we miss something? Did television really get that much more indecent in March? No worries. In these situations, we know what to do. We go over and check out the Parents Television Council's website. And sure enough, there's a plausible instigator--a PTC viewer action alert crusade against a March 8 episode of the animated comedy show the PTC just loves to hate, Fox TV's Family Guy.

Yes, Family Guy is apparently destroying the morals of America, and the FCC must do something. But even more troubling is just how PTC was able to get so many votes. You see, it didn't really like the way votes were counted in the past, so it pressured the FCC to change the way it counts to make it that much easier for PTC to stuff the ballot box in massive quantities to put extra pressure on the FCC to act. Adam Theirer explains the changes:

The FCC quietly and without major notice made two methodological changes to its tallying of broadcast indecency complaints in 2003 & 2004 that PTC requested:

• On July 1, 2003, the agency began tallying each computer-generated complaint sent to the FCC by any advocacy group as an individual complaint, rather than as one complaint as had been done previously. The advocacy group benefiting from that change had challenged the FCC to make the change by June 30th and boasted later that it was responsible for the FCC's redirection, citing reassurances of FCC commissioners.
• In the first quarter of 2004 -- the time when the Super Bowl incident with Janet Jackson occurred -- the FCC began counting complaints multiple times if the individual sent the complaint to more than one office within the FCC. This change, which had the capability of increasing by a factor of 5 or 6 or 7 the number of complaints recorded, was noted in a footnote of that quarter's FCC Quarterly Report. The footnote acknowledged that "[t]he reported counts may also include duplicate complaints or contacts..."

As I have made clear before, I have absolutely no problem with the PTC, or any other advocacy group exercising their First Amendment rights to petition their government and make their views known. What I do have a problem with -- a very big problem, in fact -- is when one group so disproportionately influences the process, especially by changing the way complaints are counted.

Even more troubling, Theirer notes, is that the FCC gave no public notice of these changes, hiding them in footnotes to reports after-the-fact (and wording the footnotes in confusing ways). And it's not like this was a change across the FCC -- it was specifically designed to further the political goals of the PTC:

More shockingly, as far as I can tell, the FCC only made these methodological changes for indecency complaints, not for any other category of complaints that the agency receives! Finally, and probably worst of all, these bogus numbers were then used by FCC officials and congressional lawmakers as supporting evidence for the supposed public outcry for more regulation of television and radio.

Regulatory capture in action. Hopefully, the new administration and the new FCC recognizes this and stops trying to have the government act as a censor for a small group of people offended that people don't know how to use the "change channel" or "power off" features on their televisions.

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Danny writes to tell us that Obscura Digital has launched their largest multitouch wall yet. 18 feet of multitouch surface is divided to allow six simultaneous users, each with their own targeted audio. The massive wall can handle 100 hi-res images and videos together in real-time. Relatedly, Atmel recently announced the release of their "maXTouch" technology, which delivers a capacitive touchscreen that boasts a refresh rate and signal-to-noise ratio that's 66% better than their nearest competitor. Hopefully this means massive multitouch surfaces will be coming into my home sooner rather than later.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Christian Ristow, best known for his hydraulic megawaldo Hand of Man, has also made this wicked wearable three-fingered power-claw. Information and imagery at Christian's site is regrettably scanty; anyone have any other links to or pictures of this machine?

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Meet RIBA, the robot nurse bear.

The cheery-looking machine has long, multi-jointed arms embedded with an array of tactile sensors that help it optimize the lifting and carrying of humans. For safety purposes, RIBA's entire body is covered in a soft skin molded from an advanced lightweight urethane foam developed by TRI. The soft skin is designed to ensure the comfort of patients while they are being carried. In addition, the arm joints yield slightly under pressure -- much like human arms do -- further increasing the level of comfort and safety.

The robotic bear can also recognize faces and voices, as well as respond to spoken commands. Using visual and audio data from its surroundings, RIBA can identify co-workers, determine the position of those nearby, and respond flexibly to changes in the immediate environment. The motors operate silently, and a set of omni-directional wheels allow the robot to navigate tight spaces inside hospitals and nursing facilities.

Video and more photos at link. RIBA robot nurse bear

We usually focus on trademark lawsuits that make no sense at all... but effective trademark law exists to prevent confusion among consumers (i.e., it's really more of a consumer protection law, rather than an "intellectual property" law) and thus there are plenty of reasonable trademark infringement lawsuits out there. This appears to be one of them. Lamp maker Luxo is apparently suing Disney for selling real versions of Pixar's iconic computer animated lamp. Pixar, of course, has long used the lamp as a part of its logo: At first, I thought perhaps Luxo was suing Disney because of the similarities to Luxo's lamps. But the issue is that Disney is now selling a real version of the Pixar lamp... and bizarrely decided to market it as "The Luxo Jr." Yes, everyone admits that John Lasseter designed the lamp to look like the Luxo lamp, but why call it that when selling it? It's amazing that of all the trademark lawyers at Disney, none of them suspected there might be a complaint from the real Luxo, if Disney were to sell a lamp using the Luxo name. This is a situation where not only a moron in a hurry, but your everyday lamp buyer, might reasonably assume that the Disney Luxo Jr. lamp is actually made by Luxo.

So, two questions: who at Disney allowed this to go forward? And why didn't Disney and Luxo just do the most obvious thing and have Luxo make the lamps for Disney?

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It's too easy to describe anything that's kinda creepy as being "Lynchian," but I can't think of a more apt term for this old Scopitone video that Spike Priggen of Bedazzled sent me. It's the Freddy Bee 4 performing "Can't Take My Eyes Off You." Excuse me while I go in the corner to quake.

CWmike writes "Twitter has modified its terms of service to state unequivocally that messages posted belong to their authors and not to the company. 'Twitter is allowed to "use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute" your tweets because that's what we do. However, they are your tweets and they belong to you,' wrote Twitter co-founder Biz Stone in a blog post Thursday announcing the modifications. Twitter is still hammering out a set of guidelines for developers on the proper use of the company's API. What do Twitterers think of the TOS changes? Barbara Krasnoff writes, ' Twitter announces new ToS. Tweeters shrug,' noting that some appreciated the company's transparency in contacting its users and pointing out the changes that were being made."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Flickr user foto_fer posted this nice writeup of how to make a cable trigger for his DSLR camera, to allow him to focus and snap photos without touching the camera. The original writeup is in Spanish, however you can read it in English using machine translation. The total cost was around US $22, however it could probably be made using scavenged parts for free.

Don't have a wired trigger port for your camera? Try a wireless remote for your Nikon DSLR, or an electromechanical trigger for any camera.

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Rina sez,

SF in SF & Tachyon Publications present Nalo Hopkinson & Michael Kurland

Saturday, September 12
Doors and cash bar open at 6:00 PM

Authors read at 7PM; followed by Q & A moderated by Terry Bisson, and schmoozing and booksigning will be in the lounge afterwards

$5 suggested donation goes straight to Variety Childrens' Charity - drop it in the donation box, or buy a beer!

The Variety Preview Room Theatre
The Hobart Bldg. 1st Floor - entrance between Quiznos and Citibank
582 Market Street at 2nd & Montgomery
San Francisco
Phone night of event - 415-572-1015
Questions? email sfinsfevents@gmail.com

I've never heard Michael read, but Nalo is an astounding performer of her own work (daughter of an actor, runs in the family). It doesn't hurt that her work is so goddamned good.

September Reading: Michael Kurland & Nalo Hopkinson

Lori sez, "UT Austin's Ransom Center has digitized their Edgar Allan Poe collection, and it's pretty cool. I especially like the copies of his books, with his notes in them."

Oh, there's tons of Poe treasure here. I'm in hog heaven.

The digital collection incorporates images of all Poe manuscripts and letters at the Ransom Center with a selection of related archival materials, two books by Poe annotated by the author, sheet music based on his poems, and portraits from the Ransom Center collections. Poe's manuscripts and letters are linked to transcriptions on the website of the Poe Society of Baltimore.

The Edgar Allan Poe Digital Collection (Thanks, Lori!)

Engadget recently had a chance to try out Panasonic's 3D demo rig, and, aside from the goofy glasses, report some impressive results. "Active shutter 3D technology once again did not fail to impress, though large format action content like the Beijing Olympics Opening Ceremony and action sports footage was far more impressive than the movie trailer. The benefit of a picture where everything, regardless of distance from the camera, is in focus is one of the biggest benefits 3D has going for it and nothing makes that more apparent than video from a large stadium. Aside from a few glitches from a pair of the glasses being low on battery and flickering annoyingly throughout, the framerate was smooth and the picture sharp, a marked difference from the jittery motion we witnessed during JVC's 3D demo earlier in the day."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

(Click images to make them bigger)

MAKE's marvelous editorial assistant, Laura Cochrane, told me about her recent visit to a discount surplus store called Mr. Stuff. I asked her to write a short piece about it.

A couple of weeks ago, I flew down to LA to visit my friend Alex. His mom recommended that we go to Brent’s deli in Northridge for breakfast one day. We did, and it was delicious.

After breakfast while walking back to the car, my eye caught on a store called Mr. Stuff. The sign was punctuated by a caricature of a regular-looking guy in jeans and a sleeveless t-shirt, with a cape and eye mask on. The sign promised: “All Kinds of Stuff!”

“We have to go in!” I announced. Alex -- a friend that kindly indulges all my random whims -- followed. The store lived up to its name: Mr. Stuff is filled with bizarre, random inventory, each object more ridiculous and hilarious than the last. I loved it! Of course thrift stores are pretty good for this sort of experience, but I’m partial to these closeout, just-fell-off-the-truck outlets.

Among Mr. Stuff’s treasure trove: Extra short screwdrivers and hammers, pots of fake dirt and moss (presumably for fake plants), talking Dr. Laura and Dennis Miller dolls, Colgate brand soap (?), blonde tape measures (with drawings of feet on them), unidentifiable Japanese hygiene products, scented canned oxygen, lots of tools, dusty TVs, $10 jeans, a mug that says "Ring bell for more coffee" (that had a bike bell attached to the handle), a mug that says “I have a crush on you!” (A mug seems like the wrong vehicle to convey that message), a wide selection of bolt cutters, machine oil (it must have been poured from a bulk container into many small containers because each label was hand-written), and lots of dishes that look like they had lead in them.

To me there’s something fascinating about surplus, unwanted products. Mr. Stuff will definitely be on my itinerary the next time I visit LA!

Sidenote: Mr. Stuff's tagline, “All Kinds of Stuff!” must have been where John Kricfalusi got the name for his blog. John likes getting names from things he comes across in the San Fernando Valley. He got the name for his George Liquor character from a liquor store called George Liquor, which amused him to no end.

A bunch of folks have been sending in the story of how some of the major record labels are suing the Ellen DeGeneres show for not paying for clips of music that the show uses during something called the "dance over" portion of the show. Not having ever watched the show, I don't know, but it sounds like a brief clip of music used as an interlude between parts of the show. As plenty of people are pointing out along with their submissions, this seems pretty silly. It's not like hearing these brief musical interludes is likely to harm the market for this music. If anything, it sounds like it would only increase interest in that music from the fans watching the show. Also, it does seem a bit odd that the show would be sued just as DeGeneres is named as a judge for American Idol (though, it's important to note that it's the producers of the show being sued, not DeGeneres herself).

However, I have to admit that the most fascinating part of the lawsuit to me is the piece pointed out by Whitney McNamara discussing how those producers first responded when the labels first asked the show why they hadn't licensed the music:

According to the suit filed Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Nashville, when representatives of the recording companies asked defendants why they hadn't obtained licenses to use the songs, defendants said they didn't "roll that way."

That won't get you very far in court, but is pretty damn funny. The response from the record labels wasn't too bad either:

"As sophisticated consumers of music, Defendants knew full well that, regardless of the way they rolled, under the Copyright Act, and under state law for the pre-1972 recordings, they needed a license to use the sound recordings lawfully."

Even though it makes little sense to me, the labels are almost certainly right here, and will almost certainly win. If, somehow, the show producers could convince a judge that this use of the music was fair use, that would be a huge victory for fair use -- but seems (unfortunately) quite unlikely. Either way, the "we don't roll that way" defense is quite amusing -- especially coming from TV producers who you would think normally fall on the "stronger copyright law" side of the fence. Imagine if a file sharer used that response?

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Colorado Springs, CO maker Ravi Gaddipati has been working on a railgun for the better part of a year. The photo above shows a shot from version one -- with the projectile going plasma! Now he's now working on version two, which packs an even more impressive capacitor bank -- forty caps each rated at 400v and 3900µf.

Interested in learning more? Check out Ravi's fascinating build log and Flickr page.

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Several different sources are reporting that Skype is shutting down their "Extras" program. The program was designed to help developers release third-party applications for the VoIP service. "Developers and users will have some adjustment time, though. Skype won't certify any new submissions, but it won't yank support for existing Extras either, that is, until their certificates expire. You'll still be able to install existing Extras through the Windows desktop client, and you'll still see them featured in the Skype shop. Skype will also continue to maintain its public API. Since many Skype Extras are sold to users as premium content, the shut down also has a financial impact for profiting developers. They'll have [...] until December 11, to continue using Skype Credit. Developers will need to submit a final invoice by January 25th; after that Skype will shutter its third-party shop."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In Scientific American, skeptic Michael Shermer presents his take on why people believe in conspiracies, even the most unlikely ones. Shermer raves about a new book on the subject by Arthur Goldwag, titled "Cults, Conspiracies, and Secret Societies: The Straight Scoop on Freemasons, The Illuminati, Skull and Bones, Black Helicopters, The New World Order, and many, many more." I find secret societies and cults to be immensely fascinating, so I'm looking forward to reading this book. And while much of Shermer's skeptical view makes sense to me, I think it's often more fun to imagine that some ultraweird and occult conspiracies do exist. From Scientific American:

But as former Nixon aide G. Gordon Liddy once told me (and he should know!), the problem with government conspiracies is that bureaucrats are incompetent and people can’t keep their mouths shut. Complex conspiracies are difficult to pull off, and so many people want their quarter hour of fame that even the Men in Black couldn’t squelch the squealers from spilling the beans. So there’s a good chance that the more elaborate a conspiracy theory is, and the more people that would need to be involved, the less likely it is true.

Why do people believe in highly improbable conspiracies? In previous columns I have provided partial answers, citing patternicity (the tendency to find meaningful patterns in random noise) and agenticity (the bent to believe the world is controlled by invisible intentional agents). Conspiracy theories connect the dots of random events into meaningful patterns and then infuse those patterns with intentional agency. Add to those propensities the confirmation bias (which seeks and finds confirmatory evidence for what we already believe) and the hindsight bias (which tailors after-the-fact explanations to what we already know happened), and we have the foundation for conspiratorial cognition.

Examples of these processes can be found in journalist Arthur Goldwag’s marvelous new book, Cults, Conspiracies, and Secret Societies (Vintage, 2009), which covers everything from the Freemasons, the Illuminati and the Bilderberg Group to black helicopters and the New World Order. “When something momentous happens, everything leading up to and away from the event seems momentous, too. Even the most trivial detail seems to glow with significance,” Goldwag explains, noting the JFK assassination as a prime example...

Buy "Cults, Conspiracies, and Secret Societies: The Straight Scoop on Freemasons, The Illuminati, Skull and Bones, Black Helicopters, The New World Order, and many, many more" (Amazon)

"Why People Believe in Conspiracies" (SciAm)

Lakisha Hogue of Coatesville, PA was too stoned to drive so she had her 6-year-old daughter take over. Hogue is now in jail. From NBCPhiladelphia.com:

The woman... was sitting in the passenger seat, laughing, when a patrol officer pulled her over, said police. Hogue told the Officer (Robert) Keetch that she was teaching her daughter how to drive.

"Mom made me drive because she was sleepy," the girl told police.

Then police say the aunt asked her niece, "Was your mom smoking that stinky stuff again?" The girl replied "yes," say police.

6-Year-Old Drives After Mom Smokes “That Stinky Stuff” (via Fortean Times)

This video of Canon 1 à 2 from J. S. Bach's Musical Offering (1747) being turned into a Moebius strip, then played in two directions at the same time would have been good to watch and listen to while I was reading the mind-bending Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid many years ago. (via cgr 2.0)

Here's a fun art event happening in NYC next week:

We will celebrate the closing of our amazing four-month journey with "Future of Mobility, Urbanity, and Water(pods)" at the World's Fair Marina in Flushing, Queens from September 16 - 27th. This celebration will include events with WFMU, Conflux Festival, Underwater New York, Swimming Cities, a series of hands-on workshops for Thriving After the Flood by artist Christopher Robbins, Natalie Jeremijenko's Environmental Health Clinic, and "Ascend" a pirate television broadcast/ planetarium installation by artist James Case Leal, concluding with an all day "I Remember Future" party on Sunday, September 27, 2009 from 11am-11pm.

More about the Waterpod:

The Waterpod is a floating, sculptural eco-habitat and living experiment that recalls the work of Buckminster Fuller, Andrea Zittel, and Constant Nieuwenhuys. In preparation for the coming world with an increase in population, a decrease in usable land, and a greater flux in environmental conditions, the Waterpod was designed by Mary Mattingly, a New York-based photographer and sculptor, in collaboration with a multinational team of artists, designers, scientists, and marine engineers. By the end of its tour the Waterpod will have docked in all five boroughs and Governors Island.

The Waterpod functions as a living sculpture that produces its own food, power, and water using permaculture design, rainwater catchment, solar power, and appropriate technologies. It is both a public space that brings art, science, and ecology into a forward-thinking ecosystem and a model of an enclosed private space, presenting the possibility to expand into ever-evolving water communities. The Waterpod connects river to visitor, global to local, nature to city, and historic to futuristic ecologies.

More:

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It's back to school time, and our friends over at the RIAA have a blog post up excitedly talking up its special "curriculum" for teachers. But, of course, that "curriculum" is laughably biased and at times outright wrong. And it makes me wonder: why would any educational institution accept a one-sided curriculum written by the industry that's clearly designed to promote that industry's own business? Do schools use science curricula provided by Exxon or Monsanto? As for the actual content included in the curriculum (which, by the way, the RIAA links to incorrectly twice), it's almost a joke. Check out the RIAA propaganda. Fair use doesn't exist -- at all. Reading through the main document, I find not a single mention of it. But what does exist is all sorts of bogeymen about how evil file sharing is, how it exposes your hard drive to viruses and reveals your tax return info.

Oh, but the best part, is that the RIAA is pushing for a new totally made up term called "songlifting" which is the central theme of every single lesson. Sounds like "shoplifting," right? That's the idea -- though the RIAA cleverly tries to pretend that it didn't make up the word. In fact, it presents it as if it's a common term. Of course, the curriculum doesn't happen to mention the Supreme Court's Dowling decision, where the court specifically talked about how very different infringement is from "stealing." Of course, the RIAA also mentions the Grokster ruling -- but is misleading there as well, claiming that the law is clear that parents could be found liable for their kids sharing unauthorized files.

The actual exercises are ridiculous propaganda. The first one is supposed to be about "math" skills for the lower grades and "spreadsheet" skills for higher level students. Guess what the "math" is?

This part of the activity should help students recognize how songlifting, though it might seem harmless at first, can quickly become a largescale problem. Have students complete the calculations on the worksheet using spreadsheet software or a calculator. If time permits, repeat the first calculation by having students choose a realistic number of songs they would take if they could get them all for free. Adding desire to the equation in this way can further dramatize why songlifting can have an enormous economic impact.

Answers
Total number of songs lifted = 7,800,000;
Total cost of songs lifted = $7,722,000.
$926,640,000 (i.e., nearly a billion dollars).

Hmm. If we're simply making stuff up for propaganda purposes, how about "total number of new listeners a musician gets thanks to such sharing?" And then "total amount those musicians make when those new fans go to concerts or purchase merchandise thanks to hearing the songs for free." Might change the math a bit, but what do I know? I'm not an industry lobbyist, so my "industry" math isn't up to par.

Then there's propaganda about job losses:

Ask students to name some people who might work in this part of the music business (e.g., machine operator, printer, packager, truck driver, store manager, cashier, online order handler, etc.). Talk about how these people might be affected by songlifting, then have students work individually or in small groups to list other music makers unnamed in the story.

Ok. Why don't we talk about the jobs on the other side of the equation? How about all of the people employed by technology companies that the RIAA has helped put out of business through lawsuits? Or students that the RIAA has bankrupted via lawsuits? Have students put together a list of just how many lives and jobs the RIAA has destroyed. Point them to the story of MP3.com. And Napster. And Launchcast. And Grokster. Tell them how the RIAA tried to have the iPod (or, more accurately, its predecessor) banned, and have them think about how different life would be without it. Tell them how the RIAA is fighting hard to tax radio stations, putting so many radio people out of business. Tell them the story of the MIT student who the RIAA suggested drop out of school to pay a fine. Talk about how all of these people might be affected by the RIAA's overreaction to innovation and new technologies, and its own inability to embrace new business models. Then have students work individually or in small groups to list other tech companies making lives better that the RIAA has threatened, sued or put out of business.

Highlight the variety of career opportunities available in the music industry by having students research one behind-the-scenes music maker and write a brief description of that job.

Highlight the variety of career opportunities available in the tech industry thanks to new innovations that the RIAA has tried to kill. Then highlight the career opportunities in the music industry itself that have finally opened up now that the major labels are scrambling to learn technology.

Next, draw the copyright symbol (©) on the chalkboard. Ask if students know what this symbol means and where they might have seen it (books, posters, CDs, etc.). Explain that the copyright symbol is used to identify the owner of a piece of intellectual property and serves as a reminder that it is illegal for anyone to copy or distribute that property without the owner's permission.

Next, explain fair use, and how the above statement claiming that it's illegal for anyone to copy or distribute without the owner's permission is not necessarily true at all. Oh wait... that sentence isn't in there.

You might also inform them that our nation's Founders included copyright protection in the U.S. Constitution (Article I, Section 8), believing that it would encourage creativity by giving the creators of intellectual property an exclusive right to profit from their artistic talents.

You might also inform them that those Founders were highly cautious about this issue, and had stated their worries that these monopolies would do more harm than good, and that they should be greatly limited and monitored to avoid such harm. You might also want to point out that the RIAA seems to have forgotten the "limited time" part of this, but I guess you can be forgiven, since they (and their friends in the movie industry) have pretty much convinced Congress to ignore that part.

Then there's this fun list of "brainstorming ideas" with some responses/corrections/clarifications after each one:

• Songlifters take millions of dollars of music each year.
  
  Actually, file sharers don't "take" any money. This is a flat out lie.
  
  
• Songlifters hurt all kinds of music makers, not just the stars.
  
  Those who have embraced file sharing in combination with smart business models have found it works for all kinds of music makers, not just the stars.
  
  
• Songlifters keep new artists from getting their chance at stardom.
  
  Many up-and-coming artists are finding that giving away their music is a large part of how they build their fanbase and become stars.
  
  
• Songlifters are breaking the law.
  
  In many cases, those who share unauthorized files may have violated copyright law, though it's a civil issue, not a criminal one.
  
  
• Songlifters can get other people in trouble by sharing illegal music.
  
  Because the RIAA isn't very good with data, it's been known to sue the wrong people
  
  
• Songlifters can get computer viruses when they illegally download online.
  
  Doing things online when not careful can result in getting viruses. That has nothing to do with file sharing. Careful users can avoid viruses.
  
  
• Songlifters don't respect other people's intellectual property.
  
  The RIAA doesn't respect fair use rights, the need for a lively and dynamic public domain or the right of technology companies to innovate.

The whole thing is pretty ridiculous frankly. It doesn't even make a half-hearted attempt at talking about the rights of everyone else or the actual purpose of copyright law. The whole thing is basically about brainwashing kids into accepting that the record labels' old business model must stay in place forever. Luckily, most kids are smarter than that and can see through such propaganda pretty quickly. However, if schools really are interested in educating kids about copyright, why not use a non-industry curriculum, like the one put together by the EFF, called Teaching Copyright.

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Allan Chochinov of Core77 let me know about this fun and useful online survival guide for designers called HACK2WORK: Essential Tips for the Design Professional.

Filled with hundreds of tips, tricks, lifehacks and advice for practicing designers, the feature covers everything from office supplies to office snacks, from essential books to essential software, and from intellectual property and design research to conferences, working with the press, and creative hiring.

Here's a partial list of some of the items you'll find:

+ How to Make Your Client's Logo Bigger Without Making Their Logo Bigger, by Michael Bierut

+ Why Does the Firm Own Everything I Do? Intellectual Property & You, by Katy Frankel

+ How to Get Invited to Speak at a Design Conference, by Alissa Walker

+ Check Please: How to Learn About Your Clients From Their Table Manners, by Liz Danzico

+ On Being T-Shaped, by Tim Brown

+ 19 Books Every Design Professional Should Own, by Andy Polaine

+ The Definitive DIY Guide for Professional Designers, by Christy Canida

+ Core77's Guide to Unconventional Office Plants, by Lisa Smith

+ 5 Keys to Successful Design Research, by Steve Portigal

+ How to Pitch Me, by Linda Tischler

HACK2WORK: Essential Tips for the Design Professional

EA has come under heavy fire lately for some deliberately shady PR techniques. You can't argue with the result, however, that has pretty much everyone (including us) talking about it. The question is: will extensive discussion, and the resulting widespread anger that seems to accompany it, actually help their game sales? Stunts have ranged from their "win a date with a booth babe" contest to paying game site editors a faux "bribe" to fit with their sin motif. "Outraged Christian bloggers, complaining female and LGBT gamers, editors being sent checks made out directly to them — all of this makes for delicious copy, and much of the gnashing of teeth seems to be centered on the fact that the gaming press continues to fall for the contrived controversy to give the company exactly what it wants: coverage. The campaign has been childish, daring, and borderline tasteless. Writing checks directly to game writers is cheaper than advertising on a site, with a much better result."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Becky Stern of Make Online says:

It's here, folks, the biggest DIY Halloween contest there is! This year's contest is sponsored by Microchip, and together we've got rad prizes to give to the best in microcontroller Halloween projects. Light up costumes, creepy decorations, candy-launching robots, we just can't get enough of Halloween; it's our all-time favorite holiday.

Above: a cute Mechamo Crab hack.

Make: Halloween Contest 2009!

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Ben Cosgrove says:

Here's a LIFE gallery of remarkable shots from NYC in its Golden Age, the 1940s, in celebration of the 400th anniversary of Henry Hudson first sailing up the river that bears his name, past the island that would be Manhattan. The Forties' art, music, sports, finance, technology -- what a time it was.

The Smithsonian Institution was established in 1846, and since then numerous weird urban legends have emerged about the buildings, the collection, and the organization's research efforts. Smithsonian Mangazine posted a fun collection of the myths and the realities. Here are two of my favorites:

Myth #4: The Smithsonian discovered Egyptian ruins in the Grand Canyon.
Fact: It didn’t.
Backstory: On April 5, 1909, the Arizona Gazette ran the following headline: “Explorations in Grand Canyon; Mysteries of Immense Rich Cavern Being Brought to Light; Jordan Is Enthused; Remarkable Find Indicates Ancient People Migrated from Orient.” The article includes testimony of one G. E. Kincaid who says that he, traveling solo down the Green and Colorado Rivers, discovered proof of an ancient civilization—possibly of Egyptian origin. The story also asserts that a Smithsonian archaeologist named S. A. Jordan returned with Kincaid to investigate the site. However, the Arizona Gazette appears to have been the only newspaper ever to have published the story. No records can confirm the existence of either Kincaid or Jordan.

Myth #5: Betsy Ross stitched the Star-Spangled Banner.
Fact: Mary Pickersgill stitched the flag that inspired the National Anthem.
Backstory: The making of the first standard of the United States is popularly attributed to Betsy Ross, a professional flagmaker who has become a national folk hero. The legend stems from Ross’ grandson, William J. Canby, who, in 1870, wrote down a story a relative had told him in 1857­—well after Ross’ death. The account goes that in spring 1776, George Washington approached Ross with a rough sketch of a flag and asked her to make a national standard. With the United States preparing to celebrate its 100th anniversary, the story about the birth of the national flag captured imaginations. There is, however, no documentation that links Ross with making the first flag, and the events described in Canby’s account take place a year before the passage of the Flag Act—the legislation that dictates the style and substance of the national flag. Visitors to the National Museum of American History sometimes ask if the Star Spangled Banner—currently on display after extensive conservation efforts—is an example of Ross’s work. That flag was stitched by Mary Pickersgill and flew over Fort McHenry during the 1814 Battle of Baltimore, inspiring Francis Scott Key to pen the poem that became our National Anthem.

Urban Legends About the Smithsonian

I love the full-scale size and community spirit of this Arduino-powered snowball game by Steve Jernigan. Instead of using a tiny screen, he hooked up a bunch of Christmas lights to make an interactive display the size of his yard, that his neighbors could enjoy playing. Fun!

Full source code and schematics are available on his website. Perhaps this could be a good starting point for your Halloween Contest entry?

[via Arduino Blog]

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sterlingda writes to tell us that scientists have built a mouse-levitating superconducting magnet, working on behalf of NASA to study variable levels of gravity. The group hopes to ascertain what physiological impacts prolonged exposure to microgravity might have. "Repeated levitation tests showed the mice, even when not sedated, could quickly acclimate to levitation inside the cage. After three or four hours, the mice acted normally, including eating and drinking. The strong magnetic fields did not seem to have any negative impacts on the mice in the short term, and past studies have shown that rats did not suffer from adverse effects after 10 weeks of strong, non-levitating magnetic fields."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Diana Alexander, director of operations for the GO Campaign says:

GO Campaign is a US nonprofit dedicated to bettering the lives of orphans and vulnerable children throughout the world. We believe education and vocational training can be inspiring and life-changing. The GO Ingenuity Award has been established to encourage the sharing of innovation and invention with marginalized youth eager for a better future.

GO Campaign announced they will award a maximum of five GO Ingenuity Awards (GIA) to artists, inventors, and small business entrepreneurs to stimulate the next generation of "makers" and turn makers into role models and sources of inspiration for children in their community.

Up to five GIAs will be awarded in amounts ranging from $500 to $2,500 each to selected applicants who are eager to share their skills with marginalized youth in developing countries in ways that educate and inspire youth to harness their own ingenuity.

The one-year, one-time fellowship grants emphasize the sharing of innovative artistry and technology in informal, hands-on learning workshops with youth. Complete Guidelines and Application available at www.gocampaign.org/gia. Application deadline: December 1, 2009

You may have heard that the new iPod Nano that was just released happens to include a voice recorder among other new features. But if you get one, you might want to be careful how you use it -- especially in certain states, such as Massachusetts. Slashdot points us to a story about a guy who was arrested in a dispute-gone-wrong with a car repair shop, but the really odd part is that beyond disorderly conduct and resisting arrest, the guy was charged with both "unlawful wiretapping and possessing a device for wiretapping." Wiretapping? In a dispute involving a mechanic? Apparently the guy had a simple Olympus digital voice recorder in his pocket, which was on during his argument with the repair shop. And Massachusetts is one of twelve states with a law that forbids taping conversations without the approval of everyone involved. Even if you accept such a law (and it doesn't make much sense to me), the inclusion of "possessing a device for wiretapping" seems really problematic. Digital voice recorders are quite common. Plus, many mobile phones and even cameras include similar things. And, of course, now with the new iPods including that, does it mean it's illegal to carry one in Massachusetts (or those eleven other states) without first announcing it and getting permission? Obviously no one's likely to get arrested just for carrying around an iPod Nano, but the fact that the law makes such a scenario possible demonstrates a pretty serious problem with the law.

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I'm excited to be going to Baby Tattooville this year (as a member of the press) and hang out with a lot of my favorite artists. If you want to attend, hurry and sign up, as only nine slots remain.

Baby Tattooville is an unlike-anything-you've-ever-heard-of-before art extravaganza. It's like a high-roller's cross between a lively art fair, a down-to-earth studio visit with famous artists, and a 'round-the-clock private party... with lots of jaw-dropping gifts for the lucky few who are adventurous enough to attend.

The event takes place early next month (October 2-4, 2009) at the spectacular Mission Inn Hotel and Spa in Riverside, California. This year's artist lineup includes James Gurney, Michael Hussar, Audrey Kawasaki, Travis Louie, Elizabeth McGrath, Miss Mindy, Johnny KMNDZ Rodriguez, KRK Ryden, Greg "Craola" Simkins, Yoskay Yamamoto and a number of surprise guests (big surprise guests).

In order to insure that attendees are able to interact directly with their favorite artists, a total of only 45 tickets are offered for sale. As mentioned above, only 9 tickets remain available as of today.

The retail price is $2500 for an individual ticket, or $3000 for a two-person ticket (the two people must occupy the same hotel room and will receive one gift bag between them). The retail price includes 2 nights hotel accommodations, several meals (including a spectacular Sunday Brunch), access to a weekend's worth of social and creative interaction with all of the attending artists, and an unbelievable assortment of original art, limited edition prints and collectible merchandise. Go to babytattooville.com to learn more and register.

In addition to everything mentioned above, you will find yourself with an unparalleled networking opportunity since you will be spending a fun and stimulating weekend with top artists, other industry professionals and media insiders.

Spend the Weekend with Your Favorite Artists and Get Lots of Exclusive Stuff

David Edgar makes great (re)use of common plastic containers, resulting in a variety of exotic creatures. Nice to see those powerfully bright detergent jugs reborn in his Plastiquarium series -

Modern myth suggests that a century of increasing phosphate levels in Earth's marine environment caused new, synthetic life forms to emerge. As recyclable HDPE plastic containers spread concentrates of consumer product pollutants, the Plastiquarium creatures evolved in the image of their packaging forbearers.

... sounds plausible to me =) A variety of Edgar's work can be seen @ Shadetree Studios. [Thanks, Terry!]

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The American Prospect reviewed a couple of books about Wal-Mart, and included this charming anecdote about Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton

Around the time that the young Sam Walton opened his first stores, John Kennedy redeemed a presidential campaign promise by persuading Congress to extend the minimum wage to retail workers, who had until then not been covered by the law. Congress granted an exclusion, however, to small businesses with annual sales beneath $1 million -- a figure that in 1965 it lowered to $250,000.

Walton was furious. The mechanization of agriculture had finally reached the backwaters of the Ozark Plateau, where he was opening one store after another. The men and women who had formerly worked on small farms suddenly found themselves redundant, and he could scoop them up for a song, as little as 50 cents an hour. Now the goddamn federal government was telling him he had to pay his workers the $1.15 hourly minimum. Walton's response was to divide up his stores into individual companies whose revenues did not exceed the $250,000 threshold. Eventually, though, a federal court ruled that this was simply a scheme to avoid paying the minimum wage, and he was ordered to pay his workers the accumulated sums he owed them, plus a double-time penalty thrown in for good measure.

Wal-Mart cut the checks, but Walton also summoned the employees at a major cluster of his stores to a meeting. "I'll fire anyone who cashes the check," he told them.

The "values" of Wal-Mart, the largest private-sector employer in the U.S., are shaping our national economy -- and that's a very bad thing. (Via WashPost)

Soychemist writes "Walk into the Taser headquarters in Scottsdale, Arizona and it may seem like you are on an episode of Get Smart. The foyer is like a fortress, with giant steel doors and biometric identification systems. Inside, factory workers meticulously assemble the less-lethal weapons by hand and then put them through a battery of safety tests. In addition to making pistol-shaped devices, the company also produces the electronic equivalent of a claymore mine, which hurls dozens of electrified needles at the push of a button and electronic shotgun cartridges that deliver a powerful jolt."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Instructables user Ookseer walks us through the process and tools for drilling tiny, precise holes. Great for making your own PCBs!

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Cake wrecks has a gallery of cakes with 9/11 themes.

Earlier this week, UK mentalist Derren Brown predicted the winning lottery numbers on live television -- watch it here. It was a neat trick, and people are still trying to figure it out.

The video above offers a plausible explanation of how he did it. Later today, Brown is going on TV to show how he really did it.

Chris Davenport used the free "digital sketchbook" NodeBox to make the hairy text above. NodeBox is an easy way to create 2D graphics with Python. Davenport posted the code, titled Hair Peace, for others to play with too. From Creative Review:

"Nodebox is really accessible and very easy to pick up and fiddle with, it's aimed mainly at designers like myself who don't have vast programming experience," (Davenport) continues. "I managed to do it in a day after never using Python before. It's all well documented on the Nodebox site and there's a community that helps with problems...

Hairy Type (Creative Review)
Hair Peace (CPD-Work)

ruphus13 was among the readers sending word of Motorola's Android handsets yesterday, along with a "socially aware" application layer called MotoBlur. The Motorola Cliq is expected in a few weeks. T-Mobile is Motorola's carrier partner in the US. A second Android phone will be marketed in other countries under the name Dext. Reuters called the market's reaction to Motorola's announcement "muted." "Dr. Sanjay K. Jha, Co-CEO of Motorola and CEO of the company's Mobile Devices division, unveiled Motorola's Android platform play. ... Key to both of the phones, and key to Motorola's overall Android strategy, is a new interface and application layer called MotoBlur. It's focused on 'a single stream' for social networking features, software updates, messages, syncing, e-mails, videos, photos... The Cliq phone has a 5-megapixel camera, slide-out keyboard, 24 frame-per-second video capabilities, GPS, a headphone jack, an advanced browser from Google, integrated Exchange service, and Google roaming services including Google voice search, access to maps, Google calendar, and more. It also provides one-click access to Android Market and the thousands of Android applications there."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Do we need some sort of anti-SLAPP-type law against bogus copyright lawsuits over similar ideas rather than actual copying? We've seen quite a trend in such lawsuits especially concerning people who claim to have had an idea for a similar book, movie or TV show. But, of course, copyright is supposed to be clear: it's for the expression, not the idea. Of course, at times it's quite difficult to separate the two, and with our society always talking up "ownership" of content, it's perhaps no surprise that many people seem to think that they get to own certain ideas. And then they file lawsuits.

The latest such case involves Jessica Seinfeld, Jerry's wife, who published a cookbook, "Deceptively Delicious: Simple Secrets to Get Your Kids Eating Good Food." It's a pretty straightforward idea, and apparently the book has done well. That upset the author of another book on the same topic, who had apparently pitched the book idea (and had it rejected) by the publisher of Seinfeld's cookbook -- so she sued for copyright infringement. But, again, copyright doesn't cover ideas -- something you would think her lawyer would understand. Thankfully, the judge quickly tossed the case, while also taking the time to issue a bit of a thumbs-down review of the cookbook by the woman suing:

"Lapine's cookbook is a dry, rather text-heavy work," Judge Laura Taylor Swain of Federal District Court wrote in her review, while Ms. Seinfeld's "cookbook has a completely different feel and appears to be directed to a different audience."

On top of the ruling, interestingly, many people are recognizing that these types of lawsuits are really no more than PR stunts by the less-well-known author to jump on the publicity bandwagon of a best-selling author. Seinfeld's lawyers are claiming that the woman suing was just using the lawsuit as a publicity attempt, which is similar to what we've seen in other lawsuits like this one. That's why it makes sense to set up significant sanctions for actions like this, where it's clearly not a case of copyright infringement, and the lawsuit is almost certainly designed not to right some wrong, but to use the justice system as part of a PR campaign.

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Novoflex has announced prices for eleven adapters for the Micro Four Thirds standard, including Pentax K, Nikon F and Sony Alpha adapters with built-in aperture control rings. The adapters provide only a mechanical connection between the lens and the body but retain automatic metering for aperture priority mode and allow focusing to infinity. All should be in stock in the US by October, according to the US distributor. Click through for US and European recommended prices.

This video has proven very popular on our Twitter feed. We have blogged about Steven Garrison's wooden gear-work before.

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Holy cats am I ever enjoying listening to Mother Mother's song "Wrecking Ball" (off their O My Heart CD) today. It's the kind of song that makes me want to get out of my seat and bounce around the room, then sit down and write something UP.

Wrecking Ball - Mother Mother

Mother Mother's site

KentuckyFC writes "Having created quantum superpositions of photons, atoms, and even molecules, scientists are currently preparing to do the same for larger objects — namely viruses. The technique will involve storing a virus in a vacuum and then cooling it to its quantum-mechanical ground state in a microcavity. Zapping the virus with a laser then leaves it in a superposition of its ground state and an excited one. That's no easy task, however. The virus will have to survive the vacuum, behave like a dielectric, and appear transparent to the laser light, which would otherwise tear it apart. Now a group of researchers has worked out that several viruses look capable of surviving the superposition process, including the common flu virus and the tobacco mosaic virus. They point out that after creating the superposition, scientists will be able to perform the Schrodinger's Cat experiment for the first time, which should be fun (but less so for the virus)."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Several readers including tyghe!! sent in a Popular Mechanics piece analyzing the Augustine Commission's recommendations and NASA itself in terms of a persistent bias towards risk aversion, and arguing that such a bias is fundamentally incompatible with the mission of opening a new frontier. "Rand Simberg, a former aerospace engineer finds the report a little too innocuous. In this analysis, Simberg asks, what happens when we take the risk out of space travel? ... Aerospace pioneer Burt Rutan said a few years ago that if we're not killing people, we're not pushing hard enough. That might sound harsh to people outside the aerospace community but, as Rutan knows, test pilots and astronauts are a breed of people that willingly accepts certain risk in order to be part of great endeavors. They're volunteers and they know what they're getting into."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Several readers including tyghe!! sent in a Popular Mechanics piece analyzing the Augustine Commision's recommendations and NASA itself in terms of a persistent bias towards risk aversion, and arguing that such a bias is fundamentally incompatible with the mission of opening a new frontier. "Rand Simberg, a former aerospace engineer finds the report a little too innocuous. In this analysis, Simberg asks, what happens when we take the risk out of space travel? ... Aerospace pioneer Burt Rutan said a few years ago that if we're not killing people, we're not pushing hard enough. That might sound harsh to people outside the aerospace community but, as Rutan knows, test pilots and astronauts are a breed of people that willingly accepts certain risk in order to be part of great endeavors. They're volunteers and they know what they're getting into."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

While we often talk about copyright, patents and trademarks as "intellectual property" (a misnomer, of course) there are some other related areas as well. One that has been growing in importance is the idea of "publicity rights" as a separate "right." The issue, of course, is usually about whether a company can use the likeness of someone for commercial purposes without their permission. But that issue is getting more and more complicated as technology gets better and better. In the last few decades, for example, there's been a growing trend to use famous dead people, such as John Wayne, Lucille Ball and Fred Astaire in commercials. But those mostly involved taking clips of those actors from existing films/TV and splicing them into a commercial (with permission from their estates). However, as some lawyers have been noting, with better and better digital technologies, this issue is becoming more important as it's now possible to digitally recreate someone for the purpose of film. Or, say, a video game. Apparently in Guitar Hero 5, singer Kurt Cobain has been... well... reanimated, and some find it rather distasteful (especially since he sings a bunch of songs you wouldn't expect him to sing).

Among those most upset? Cobain's widow, Courtney Love, who is threatening to sue Activision for breach of contract. Since she's claiming it's a breach of contract issue, there are (obviously) plenty of questions over what's in the actual contract. Still, like with patents and copyright, there is plenty of concern about how far publicity rights extend. In the Law.com article above, it notes that publicity rights didn't used to apply to the deceased, but that's changed. More troubling?

Initially, the right covered only a person's name and likeness. But courts expanded the protected "persona" to cover a variety of elements. Bette Midler and Tom Waits were allowed to pursue claims against advertisers featuring singers using similar vocal styles. Vanna White and George Wendt were allowed to sue companies using robots evoking their roles as the letter-turner and barfly in "Wheel of Fortune" and "Cheers" respectively. Lothar Motschenbacher was allowed to claim damages based on an advertiser's use of a distinctively ornamented racing car.

That certainly reflects the expansion of copyright and patents -- beginning narrowly focused and then expanding over time. I can certainly understand the desire for a "publicity right," but I wonder if it's not better handled through other laws -- such as trademark, fraud and contract law, rather than creating separate boundaries for "publicity rights." I can understand why Love is upset about the use of Cobain's image, but at some point you have to wonder whether it really makes sense to limit such uses. As the technology gets better and better, the legal questions are only going to get more complicated -- and, once again, we're likely to see the reach of such rights extended, perhaps in ways that make little sense.

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An anonymous reader writes "The Slashdot community has recently questioned what Oracle will do with Sun hardware if and when Oracle's acquisition of Sun closes. And it seems that speculation about the future of SPARC hardware has been common among Slashdot commenters for years. That said, it seems newsworthy that Oracle is going out of their way with some aggressive marketing directed at IBM to state clearly their plans to put more money than Sun does now into SPARC and Solaris." MySQL is not mentioned in this ad, perhaps because (as Matt Asay speculates) the EU is looking closely into that aspect of the proposed acquisition.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes "The Slashdot community has recently questioned what Oracle will do with Sun hardware if and when Oracle's acquisition of Sun closes. And it seems that speculation about the future of SPARC hardware has been common among Slashdot commenters for years. That said, it seems newsworthy that Oracle is going out of their way with some aggressive marketing directed at IBM to state clearly their plans to put more money than Sun does now into SPARC and Solaris." MySQL is not mentioned in this ad, perhaps because (as Matt Asay speculates) the EU is looking closely into that aspect of the proposed acquisition.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes "The Slashdot community has recently questioned what Oracle will do with Sun hardware if and when Oracle's acquisition of Sun closes. And it seems that speculation about the future of SPARC hardware has been common among Slashdot commenters for years. That said, it seems newsworthy that Oracle is going out of their way with some aggressive marketing directed at IBM to state clearly their plans to put more money than Sun does now into SPARC and Solaris." MySQL is not mentioned in this ad, perhaps because (as Matt Asay speculates) the EU is looking closely into that aspect of the proposed acquisition.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

More than one commenter on yesterday's post about tweels in development for the military expressed curiosity about the possibility of non-pneumatic bicycle tires. Turns out you can buy them, online, right now, from here, and here, and probably some other places that don't turn up in a Froogle search. I have not tried them myself but I'd be curious to have comments from anyone who has.

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Jeff-o created the Thingamaplush for his 2-year old daughter, using the schematic from a Bleep Labs Thingamakit as basis for his sound circuit. Now I'm wishing I had one back in the day. Oh well, never too late for noisy toys -

I tweaked the design a bit to fit my own purposes, ending up with a sort of hybrid between the Thingamakit and the Thingamagoop. The electronics are stuffed into a plush robot I designed myself, and assembled with the help of my mother (how's that for some geeky mother-son bonding?)
This instructable will detail sewing the robot body, and stuffing it with my custom made board. Of course, you may remix any part of it to suit your own needs. You could design a different body, or install different electronics. Maybe an Atari Punk Console? Or a Robot Voice Modulator? It's up to you! You could even omit the electronics completely, to create a cute little robot toy.

Relevant schematic, PCB layout, and steps for sewing/wiring the huggable enclosure can be found on the project's instructable.

In the Maker Shed:

Thing-a-ma KIT

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bonch writes "Apple has open sourced libdispatch, also known as Grand Central Dispatch, which is technology in Snow Leopard that makes it easier for developers to take advantage of multi-core parallelism. Kernel support is not required, but performance optimizations Apple made for supporting GCD are visible in xnu. Block support in C is required and is currently available in LLVM (note that Apple has submitted their implementation of C blocks for standardization)." Update: 09/11 15:32 GMT by KD : Drew McCormack has a post up speculating on what Apple's move means to Linux and other communities (but probably not Microsoft): "...this is also very interesting for scientific developers. It may be possible to parallelize code in the not too distant future using Grand Central Dispatch, and run that code not only on Macs, but also on clusters and supercomputers."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

bonch writes "Apple has open sourced libdispatch, also known as Grand Central Dispatch, which is technology in Snow Leopard that makes it easier for developers to take advantage of multi-core parallelism. Kernel support is not required, but performance optimizations Apple made for supporting GCD are visible in xnu. Block support in C is required and is currently available in LLVM (note that Apple has submitted their implementation of C blocks for standardization)."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

bonch writes "Apple has open sourced libdispatch, also known as Grand Central Dispatch, which is technology in Snow Leopard that makes it easier for developers to take advantage of multi-core parallelism. Kernel support is not required, but performance optimizations Apple made for supporting GCD are visible in xnu. Block support in C is required and is currently available in LLVM (note that Apple has submitted their implementation of C blocks for standardization)."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

bonch writes "Apple has open sourced libdispatch, also known as Grand Central Dispatch, which is technology in Snow Leopard that makes it easier for developers to take advantage of multi-core parallelism. Kernel support is not required, but performance optimizations Apple made for supporting GCD are visible in xnu. Block support in C is required and is currently available in LLVM (note that Apple has submitted their implementation of C blocks for standardization)."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Build a Blubberbot. A light-seeking robotic inflatable in search of light and cellphone signals.
To download The Blubbebot video click here or subscribe in iTunes.
In the Maker Shed:
Blubber Bot Robotic Inflatable

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One of the reasons we spend so much time talking about the music and news industries, is because the disruption and upheaval happening in those industries right now are likely to impact nearly every industry you can think of in the near future. Understanding the mistakes being made by those in the industries that are further along the disruption curve should (hopefully, though, I'm not entirely optimistic on this) help keep those newer industries from making the same mistakes down the road.

Jake points us to an inkling of how the higher education market is beginning to be disrupted -- and it goes beyond just cheaper textbooks or courses being offered online. By now, online distance learning is well-known and not all that big a deal. But, really, all the old school online university efforts, like University of Phoenix, did was to take the traditional college model and move it online. True disruptive innovation is never about just moving a legacy model to a new medium, but about embracing some aspect of that new medium to offer something in a different way that really wasn't possible prior to that.

The article in Washington Monthly discusses a company called StraighterLine, which offers online college classes, but it totally disrupts the traditional business model of university learning. While the classic model is that you pay per class (or per semester as a fully matriculated student), StraighterLine has a simple model: you pay $99/month and get an all-you-can-eat offering. You go at your own pace -- so if you have lots of time (and can complete the work) you can take multiple classes in that month. In the opening story of the article, a woman completes four full classes in just two months -- for a grand total of $200. Taking those same classes at either local universities or online would have cost thousands, and would have taken much longer to complete. And, it's not as if the StraighterLine courses skimp either. According to the article (and it would be great to hear from anyone who's tried it to see if this is true), they use the same materials found in many college courses.

The reasoning behind all of this will sound familiar to those who read Techdirt on a regular basis:

Even as the cost of educating students fell, tuition rose at nearly three times the rate of inflation. Web-based courses weren't providing the promised price competition--in fact, many traditional universities were charging extra for online classes, tacking a "technology fee" onto their standard (and rising) rates. Rather than trying to overturn the status quo, big, publicly traded companies like Phoenix were profiting from it by cutting costs, charging rates similar to those at traditional universities, and pocketing the difference.

This, Smith explained, was where StraighterLine came in. The cost of storing and communicating information over the Internet had fallen to almost nothing. Electronic course content in standard introductory classes had become a low-cost commodity. The only expensive thing left in higher education was the labor, the price of hiring a smart, knowledgeable person to help students when only a person would do. And the unique Smarthinking call-center model made that much cheaper, too. By putting these things together, Smith could offer introductory college courses a la carte, at a price that seemed to be missing a digit or two, or three: $99 per month, by subscription. Economics tells us that prices fall to marginal cost in the long run. Burck Smith simply decided to get there first.

Just like Craigslist. In fact, the article goes on to make that comparison, and highlight how similar the newspaper business and the University business are. It notes that freshman lectures are "higher education's equivalent of the classified section" in that they're insanely profitable and subsidize many other areas of the business.

And, just like Craigslist and newspapers, colleges started pushing back against StraighterLine, worrying about how it would impact them. In fact, it's caused quite a bit of trouble for StraighterLine, causing it to be split off from its original parent company, Smarthinking. Meanwhile, other complaints have made it difficult for StraighterLine to follow through on its partnering strategy to deal with questions concerning accreditation. So, StraighterLine itself may never become a huge success, but it gives you a glimpse of how the world is changing and how the higher education system may be ripe for disruptive innovation as well.

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CWmike writes "Google is promoting a payment system to the newspaper industry that would let Web surfers pay a small amount for individual news stories, an idea that could help publishers struggling with the impact of the Internet. The plans were revealed in a document Google submitted to the Newspaper Association of America (NAA), which had solicited ideas for how to monetize content online, a task some publishers have had difficulty with. 'The idea is to allow viable payments of a penny to several dollars by aggregating purchases across merchants,' Google said in the document. Google said it had no specific products to announce yet."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

CWmike writes "Google is promoting a payment system to the newspaper industry that would let Web surfers pay a small amount for individual news stories, an idea that could help publishers struggling with the impact of the Internet. The plans were revealed in a document Google submitted to the Newspaper Association of America (NAA), which had solicited ideas for how to monetize content online, a task some publishers have had difficulty with. 'The idea is to allow viable payments of a penny to several dollars by aggregating purchases across merchants,' Google said in the document. Google said it had no specific products to announce yet."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It's here, folks, the biggest DIY Halloween contest there is! This year's contest is sponsored by Microchip, and together we've got rad prizes to give to the best in microcontroller Halloween projects. Light up costumes, creepy decorations, candy-launching robots, we just can't get enough of Halloween; it's our all-time favorite holiday.

Before you get started be sure to pick up a copy of our MAKE DIY Halloween issue! DIY HALLOWEEN from the editors of MAKE and CRAFT brings you 40-plus DIY projects for the holiday that's made for makers. From the craftiest costumes to amazing animated props and the latest in computer-controlled haunted house effects.

The skinny:

Microchip Technology Inc. and MAKE have teamed up to present to you the Make: Halloween Contest 2009! Show us your embedded microcontroller Halloween projects and win cool prizes! Use any microcontroller to make anything from themed lawn decorations to creative costumes. The Make: Halloween Contest will run for 8 weeks, and winners will be announced on Friday, November 6th. Deadline for entries is 11:59 p.m. PDT November 3, 2009. The MAKE team will choose one (1) grand prize winner and three (3) runners-up.

Prizes:

Grand Prize: Starter Kit Bundle, Retail Value $600, which includes the following:

• PIC18 Starter Kit
• PIC24F Starter Ki
• dsPIC® DSC Starter Kit
• PIC32 Starter Kit
• Memory Starter Kit
• FI Evaluation Platform
• PICkit^TM 3

Runner-Up Prizes: PICDEM^TM Lab, PICkit^TM 3, OR F1 Starter Kit. Each runner-up will receive one of the three prizes mentioned as well as a $50 Maker Shed gift certificate!

Enter as many times as you like, but you can only win one prize. To submit a project, you can either submit photos to the Make: Halloween Contest Flickr pool or upload a video and add it to the Make: Halloween Contest YouTube group. Please include a short description when you post images/videos. In addition to this, our zombie skeleton judges require you fill out or contest entry form. Open source projects encouraged, so post up those schematics and parts lists!

For complete rules, please visit the Make: Halloween Contest guidelines page.

A few Halloween projects to get you excited:

The Magic Mirror - Arduino Powered (and other winners from last year)

DIY Halloween - amazing costumes, scary tech, pumpkins and gross food - officially awesome

Build: Mechamo Crab & Halloween Hack

Weekend Project: Cylon Jack O' Lantern

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MrfixitRick is back at it, this time around he's debuting his Tesla CD turbine pencil sharpener. Keen observers will notice the duel blade turbine in a standard jewel case enclosure.

This is possibly the worlds simplest turbine. It's uses a CD jewel case, with only two CD discs as the rotor. The four magnets between the discs act as spacers and magnetic drive.

This turbine has no shaft, no bearings, and no seals, and on compressed air is capable of speeds of up to 8000 rpm.

The turbine is shown magnetically coupled to the pencil sharpener, and propelling it at speeds up to 2200 rpm (so far!). It takes down a pencil real fast!

Related:

Tesla turbine + shake flashlight - Link

Tesla meets the Salad Shooter - Link

Tesla turbine from a CD disc pack -Link

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This week's story on the Escape Pod science fiction podcast is a remarkable tale called "Mr. Penumbra's Twenty-Four-Hour Book Store" written by Robin Sloan and billed as a "short story about recession, attraction and data-visualization" and it is fabulous. It's a fantastic, magical realist tale about Google Book Search, magick with a K, an olde curiousity shoppe, and the power of data-visualization. The story was initially self-published on Sloan's blog and was recommended to the Escape Pod editors by a friend, who read it, loved it and bought it. If you enjoyed Ben Rosenbaum's The Ant King: A California Fairy Tale, you'll love this.

IT'S 2:02 A.M. ON A COLD SUMMER NIGHT.

I'm sitting in a book store next to a strip club.

Not that kind of book store. The inventory here is incredibly old and impossibly rare. And it has a secret--a secret that I might have just discovered.

I am alone in the store. And then, tap-tap, suddenly I'm not.

And now I'm pretty sure I'm about to snap my laptop shut, run screaming out the front door, and never return.

* * *

I SHOULD START AT THE BEGINNING.

I lost my job in the slumped-over spring of 2009. I applied for dozens of replacement gigs but was rebuffed, again and again. And I took only the coldest comfort when the companies doing the rebuffing were, themselves, forced out of business months later. I probably couldn't have turned them around single-handedly. Probably.

The job I lost was at the corporate headquarters of the New Amsterdam Bagel Bakery. I designed bagel marketing materials. Menus, coupons, posters for store windows, and, once, an entire booth "experience" for the bagel industry trade show.

I also ran the website.

Now, months into my unemployment, I'd started watching for "help wanted" signs in windows, which is not something you really do, right? I was taught to be suspicious of those. Legitimate employers use Craigslist.

EP215: Mr. Penumbra's Twenty-Four-Hour Book Store (podcast)

Mr. Penumbra's Twenty-Four-Hour Book Store (text)

This week's story on the Escape Pod science fiction podcast is a remarkable tale called "Mr. Penumbra's Twenty-Four-Hour Book Store" written by Robin Sloan and billed as a "short story about recession, attraction and data-visualization" and it is fabulous. It's a fantastic, magical realist tale about Google Book Search, magick with a K, an olde curiousity shoppe, and the power of data-visualization. The story was initially self-published on Sloan's blog and was recommended to the Escape Pod editors by a friend, who read it, loved it and bought it. If you enjoyed Ben Rosenbaum's The Ant King: A California Fairy Tale, you'll love this.

IT'S 2:02 A.M. ON A COLD SUMMER NIGHT.

I'm sitting in a book store next to a strip club.

Not that kind of book store. The inventory here is incredibly old and impossibly rare. And it has a secret--a secret that I might have just discovered.

I am alone in the store. And then, tap-tap, suddenly I'm not.

And now I'm pretty sure I'm about to snap my laptop shut, run screaming out the front door, and never return.

* * *

I SHOULD START AT THE BEGINNING.

I lost my job in the slumped-over spring of 2009. I applied for dozens of replacement gigs but was rebuffed, again and again. And I took only the coldest comfort when the companies doing the rebuffing were, themselves, forced out of business months later. I probably couldn't have turned them around single-handedly. Probably.

The job I lost was at the corporate headquarters of the New Amsterdam Bagel Bakery. I designed bagel marketing materials. Menus, coupons, posters for store windows, and, once, an entire booth "experience" for the bagel industry trade show.

I also ran the website.

Now, months into my unemployment, I'd started watching for "help wanted" signs in windows, which is not something you really do, right? I was taught to be suspicious of those. Legitimate employers use Craigslist.

EP215: Mr. Penumbra's Twenty-Four-Hour Book Store (podcast)

Mr. Penumbra's Twenty-Four-Hour Book Store (text)

In Congressional hearings on Thursday about the Google book settlement, most of the news reports focused on two particular things: (1) the fact that Marybeth Peters, head of the US Copyright Office, spoke out against the settlement, claiming that it violates copyright law and (2) Google's "concession" in letting other booksellers offer up the "orphan works" that Google would scan. Both are interesting, if not particularly surprising developments. Indeed, the controversy over the question of orphan works in the Google books settlement is a big one. But the real issue isn't the settlement, but copyright law itself. The whole problem of "orphan works" is solely a result of the continual and ridiculous level of copyright expansion over the years that has created these so-called "orphan works." It seems that the only person who actually seemed willing to discuss that was Rep. Zoe Lofgren, who actually used the occasion to call for a repeal to the 1998 Copyright Term Extension Act, noting that it was a large part of the problem. While that has almost no shot of actually happening, it's great to see at least one person in Congress recognizing that the problem was created by Congress (at the demand -- and funding -- of the entertainment industry).

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Dan Jones writes "Ah the irony. The week Facebook is being asked to cough up source code to satisfy an alleged patent infringement, the company releases an open source Web server. The Web server framework that Facebook will offer as open source is called Tornado, was written in the Python language and is designed for quickly processing thousands of simultaneous connections. Tornado is a core piece of infrastructure that powers FriendFeed's real-time functionality, which Facebook maintains. While Tornado is similar to existing Web-frameworks in Python, it focuses on speed and handling large amounts of simultaneous traffic."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This hacked IKEA lamp uses an Arduino to create interesting lighting combinations at the push of a button. It uses 20 RGB LEDs to create the light show, and is powered by an old cell phone charger. Neat!

This is a project I have been working on for the past 2-3 weeks. I wanted to create a night light which had to be very simple to use and with no parts that can be consumed by babies!

In the Maker Shed:


Make: Arduino

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A bunch of folks have been sending in this story about how a carrier pigeon beat a broadband line in transferring 4 gigs of data between two offices 60 miles apart. The problem with such stunts is that they're rather meaningless. All you need to do is pick a storage size for the pigeon that is sufficiently large. The speed of the broadband connection is known in advance, and so you can just pick a file size that is significantly larger. Given the right sizes, I'd imagine that flying across the Atlantic with hard drives full of data is probably faster than some trans-Atlantic fiber cables as well. It doesn't mean that the cable is necessarily slow. The point is that for some things a "sneakernet" or (in this case) "pigeon net" will be faster. It does sound like the DSL connection being used was, in fact, slow, but that can be demonstrated just as easily by, I don't know, noting the actual bandwidth of the connection. I guess, as a publicity stunt, it draws attention, but I can't see how it's really that meaningful.

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Anaglyph sez, "I was going to do a post on my blog about Kraft's new Vegemite product and I visited their official site to find that before you can get access you're forced to agree to one of the the stupidest legal disclaimers I've ever read on the net. To whit: they expressly forbid anyone to link to them!"

You may access and display pages of the Site on a computer or a monitor, and print out for your personal use any whole page or pages of this Site. All other use, copying or reproduction of any part of this Site is prohibited (save to the extent permitted by law). Without limiting the foregoing, no part of this Site may be reproduced on any other internet site, and you are not authorised to redistribute or sell the material or reverse engineer, disassemble, or otherwise convert it to any other form that people can use. You are also prohibited from linking the Site to another website in any way whatsoever. [emphasis added]

This is like saying "You are prohibited from giving people directions to the Kraft factory." Putting a link to a URL on your site doesn't require permission of the linkee. You can say it all you want, but it doesn't make it true. Still, goes to show you that all the legendary brilliance and efficiency of the consumer packaged goods giants is vastly overrated -- what a pack of morons.

Allow me to remind you of Boing Boing's superior linking policy.

Terms of Use, Disclaimer and Copyright Notice (Thanks, Anaglyph!

Barence writes "Music streaming service Spotify has been forced to enact tight restrictions on new members in the UK, and revert back to an invite-only system. The company has decided to take drastic action following the release of its iPhone and Android apps earlier this week, which have created 'huge demand in the UK,' according to Spotify. People who don't want to put their hand in their pocket and don't have any friends can sign up to a waiting list instead."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

South African athlete Caster Semenya (shown here holding a gold medal she's just won) has been the subject of gender-related cheating allegations. She was forced to take a gender test (perhaps more accurately, a "sex test"), and the results have been released: Semenya is intersexed.

For context: we're not just talking about deeply personal medical news becoming very public world news, we're talking about that happening before the person involved was informed or counseled on the results. And, she had no option to keep the very private information private.

Mainstream news coverage, within South Africa and worldwide, has reflected ignorance, and worse. Here's a snip from a news article that describes her with the derogatory term "hermaphrodite":

The athletics governing body is also expected to advise her to have surgery to fix the potentially deadly condition, the paper reported. The IAAF would not comment on the results that have yet to be released.

You stay classy, New York Daily News. Blogger Pam of Pam's House Blend, where I'm reading this news, says,

Someone please tell me how the f*ck her natural condition -- which is that of a superb physical athlete -- is deadly? Thankfully Semenya wants no part of this.

Update: Some BB commenters have pointed out that the "potentially deadly condition" of which they they speak may be the belief that having male sexual organs "embedded" within the body means elevated cancer risk in intersexed people. Another BB commenter who says they're an intersexed person argues the purported risk is a ruse to pressure intersexed people towards altering themselves through surgery.

Semenya, who identifies as female, says,

"God made me the way I am and I accept myself. I am who I am and I'm proud of myself," she told [South Africa's] You Magazine, which ran a photo spread. "I don't want to talk about the tests. I'm not even thinking about them."

Runner Caster Semenya takes gender test -- she is intersexed; MSM reporting is offensive (pamshouseblend.com, via Kate Bornstein)

A bunch of folks have been sending in Roger Cohen's NY Times Op-Ed basically mocking those who claim that Twitter is replacing journalism. The only problem? It's not clear anyone is actually doing that. I actually agree with much of Cohen's op-ed, but it seems to be setting itself up against a strawman that doesn't exist. No one's saying that Twitter replaces journalism. Just that it (and blogs and social networks and a variety of other new tools) help change the overall landscape that is journalism. So, when Cohen writes:

For journalism is distillation. It is a choice of material, whether in words or image, made in pursuit of presenting the truest and fairest, most vivid and complete representation of a situation.

It comes into being only through an organizing intelligence, an organizing sensibility. It depends on form, an unfashionable little word, without which significance is lost to chaos. As Aristotle suggested more than two millennia ago, form requires a beginning and middle and end. It demands unity of theme. Journalism cuts through the atwitter state to thematic coherence.

I agree. But I don't see how that says anything bad about Twitter or participatory journalism at all. In fact, it just reminds me of why the larger ecosystem allows more wonderful things to happen thanks to these new tools. Of course there's still an important role for distilling all of the info. Of course there's still a huge role for professional journalists. I don't think anyone denies that. But that's not a condemnation of Twitter or the fact that it's being used by many as a part of the journalism process. It just highlights how there's a bigger ecosystem of data and information for the professional journalists to distill. And it would be great if they did that instead of spending so much time fretting about the rise of these tools instead.

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Randall Munroe, creator of the awesome XKCD webcomic, is coming to San Francisco to give a benefit appearance and reading for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Now that sounds like a kick-ass evening.

Monday, September 21st will be the second Geek Reading event to benefit EFF, at 111 Minna in downtown San Francisco. This time, the author in question is Randall Munroe, otherwise known as the writer and cartoonist behind the brilliant webcomic xkcd...

Reddit and Breadpig founder Alexis Ohanian will be emceeing the event, which will include a visual presentation as well as an interview portion, with questions culled from the top-voted comments on Reddit. Randall's new book "xkcd: Volume 0" we be available for purchase and signings as well.

The main event starts at 7 and tickets are $30. But you can also join the VIP reception ($100 donation) a bit earlier, at 6, for some extra face time with the man behind the most complex stick figures ever drawn. Numbers are limited, so get your tickets now!

Geek Reading: xkcd creator Randall Munroe
Monday, September 21, 2009
VIP Reception: 6:00
Reading: 7:00
111 Minna Gallery, 111 Minna Street, San Francisco

EFF's Geek Reading: xkcd Webcomic Author Randall Munroe

Recycled bottles smushed into rough cubes and than stacked like a temple... [via Core77]

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Dictator Wars is the latest game from GameLayers, the creators of the Nethernet (AKA Passively Multiplayer Online Game). Justin Hall sez,

In Dictator Wars you can arrest dissident bloggers, move the national treasury into your home, and subsidize the price of oil to create religious policemen. Players can ban threatening religions, develop domestic drug production, and ride around on aircraft carriers threatening larger nations.

Dictator Wars is a Facebook game merging social games with geopolitical extreme leadership. To be successful, you must collaborate with your co-tyrants in Foreign Affairs. And fighting other players means putting your winter and summer palace on the line. What kind of Dear Leader will you be?

Dictator Wars: Your Game of Supreme National Power (Thanks, Justin!)

(Disclosure: I'm proud to serve on the GameLayers advisory board)

Once again it's time for the annual Sysadmin of the Year award, and nominations are open. Of course, my vote -- as always -- goes to our very own Ken Snider, the very epitome of everything wonderful about sysadmins. Ken is level-headed and calm, technically skilled, bright and quick, tireless and impassioned. He cares about the systems and he cares about the people who use them. He has beaten DoS attacks, tuned and maintained our hardware to a startling level of reliability, and has gotten out of a warm bed more times than I can count to battle demon entropy. What's more, Ken cares about systems in general, with a deep commitment to justice and freedom on the network. Thank you Ken, you're the sysadmin of the century in my books.

We're talking about sysadmins here--the unsung rock stars of IT. The kind of sysadmin that plays the network blindfolded and upside down like Stevie Ray Vaughn, makes ch, ch, changes faster than David Bowie, smashes hackers like Pete Townsend does with guitars, keeps the show going like Bill Graham, and does it all with Ringo's good humor.

Sysadmins can really rock your world. Now it's time to rock it back.

The 2009 System Administrator of the Year contest is your opportunity to launch your organization's sysadmin rock star to superstardom. Simply nominate your sysadmin or IT rock star here. Be prepared to write a thoughtful, detailed description of why your sysadmin rock star deserves global acclaim.

About - Sysadmin of the Year Contest (Thanks, Barak!)

The former FriendFeed company now owned by Facebook did something very interesting today. They released Tornado which is the customized web server that runs the backend of FriendFeed.

I speculate in a thread on FF: "Just thinking out loud if there were a REST interface for the backend that worked like the REST interface for the client, I would be able to program both ends without having to learn the internals of your system. It would be really elegant, and probably wouldn't cost that much in overhead. I was able to create an interface to the client side of your realtime API in an hour or two. If I could sneak into the backend the same way that's all I'd need to at least put together a proof of concept. Does this make any sense?"

We need what their backend does to make the connection from rssCloud to desktops. This is something the FriendFeed guys mastered, and there's reason to believe it scales to the level we'd need since they are the guys who did GMail and Google Maps.

Interesting times we live in.

I also reminded people that when cool technologies are shipping everywhere it's not a time of death it's a time of life, as long as we have the web to connect our work, there's nothing exclusive about it. The engineers don't think we're wiping each other out, only the pundits and the hangers-on do.

Interesting times we live in.

And that's a good thing.

BTW, elsewhere on Facebook, our friend Blake Ross shipped Facebook Lite, which we heard was wonderful and are not surprised to find out is. Congrats all around!

Tree of life - amazing animation...

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The bizarre story of Connected Nation continues. While the telco-backed broadband mapping organization that politicians all seem gaga over has been able to sweep politicians in Minnesota and Florida off their feet, despite dubious qualifications and/or reviews, Connected Nation has apparently decided to bail out on bidding for the broadband mapping opportunity in Kentucky. This is significant, because Connected Nation is from Kentucky. It was originally Connect Kentucky, and it was the group's supposed "success" in mapping broadband deployments in Kentucky that led to the formation of Connected Nation. In other words, not only does Connected Nation actually have experience in Kentucky (unlike those other states), it should already have the maps. And yet it's suddenly claiming that it can't meet the deadlines laid out in the proposal? Art Brodsky questions the claim:

Is the deadline issue what chased Connected Nation out of Kentucky? Perhaps. There may be other factors at play, including that the Commonwealth wanted the vendor to work with all providers, and two of those significant sectors -- cable and municipals -- are not happy with the telephone-dominated nature of Connected Nation. It's also worth noting that the Kentucky state government, aware of the criticism of Connect Kentucky's efforts, was planning a very strict follow-up procedure for the stimulus mapping program. The Request for Proposals mentioned there would be a third-party verification of "any and all data at any location." That condition would seem to conflict with the general Connect philosophy of controlling access to the information. But we digress.

Given all this, it's worth asking: does the state of Kentucky have the broadband mapping data that Connect Kentucky did for it earlier? Can it give that data to other providers? Or must those providers start from scratch as Connect Kentucky takes its data and goes home?

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nuur writes "Researchers at the Australian National University have developed a new form of optical memory that allows random access to stored optical quantum information. Pulses of light are stored on a kind of 'optical conveyor-belt' that is controlled with a magnetic field. By manipulating the magnetic field, the conveyor-belt can be moved, allowing the recall of any part of the stored optical information. The research is published in Nature." You'll probably know after reading the abstract linked whether you'd be in the market to pay for the whole thing.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

nuur writes "Researchers at the Australian National University have developed a new form of optical memory that allows random access to stored optical quantum information. Pulses of light are stored on a kind of 'optical conveyor-belt' that is controlled with a magnetic field. By manipulating the magnetic field, the conveyor-belt can be moved, allowing the recall of any part of the stored optical information. The research is published in Nature." You'll probably know after reading the abstract linked whether you'd be in the market to pay for the whole thing.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Yesterday I posted a Flashback feature pointing to the Gomicycle Honda Rebel 250 electric conversion project from MAKE Volume 14. West Virginia Tech University mechanical engineering student Justin Cole wrote in the comments:

I like the idea of a feasible and cheap electric motorcycle. I liked it so much that I built one as my senior mechanical engineering project last semester. My team and I built an electric motorcycle with the budget and simplicity in mind. A few basics were to keep costs down, get a decent drivable distance, and keep the design of the bike simple so that builders and makers at home could build this if they felt they had the skills needed. The total cost of the bike came out to $2100 and has a range of 25 miles. I set up a website through my school and have submitted it to Make before but I guess its not fit for Make. Our whole project report in available for download on the downloads page along with videos of the bike in action and a few of the drawings. The report has a full 18 page appendix with all the figures and graphs that we used. Our Excel spread sheet is also available. If anyone is interested go to http://sae.wvutech.edu/projects/electricbike/.

Awesome, Justin, thanks for sharing! The project site is comprehensive, offering design, components, research, build photos, videos, and an entire page of downloadable reports, specs, and diagrams. A perfect fit for MAKE, actually, and a great resources for folks working on motorcycle conversions.

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A couple people have sent over Bob Lefsetz' recent post, where he bashes some of the "extreme marketing" efforts from musicians lately. In fact, he picks on quite a few of the examples that we've set out as good examples, including Josh Freese, Jill Sobule and Moldover -- complaining that these are all gimmicks that outshine the music. He asks how many people who have heard about these gimmicks actually heard the music from these artists.

I think he's both right and wrong on this. First, you have to say "compared to what." If Freese, Sobule and Moldover had just come out with an album in the traditional way, how many of the same group of people would likely have heard the album? I'd say a lot fewer. I doubt I would have heard any of them, and now I'm quite familiar with the music of all three.

But... his larger point is definitely dead on. At the core of all of this, it is the music that is key. But putting out good music and being a good marketer are not mutually exclusive. If you do something cool -- something fun or valuable or neat beyond just the music -- it's not going to matter as much if the music itself isn't good. This is why, I have to admit, the one area where I think all three of these artists could have done a better job is actually making the music itself free. All three offered really compelling reasons to buy, but they still hid away the actual music. Why not free up the MP3s, continue the cool "reasons to buy" and get the best of both worlds. Then you get everything: you get people listening to the music and feeling a connection there. You get people paying attention for the "marketing" part, and you still make money thanks to the "reasons to buy."

But that doesn't mean that doing a smart marketing promotion is a bad thing. It just needs to tie in well with the music. The existing "true fans" will already want to hear the music, but if part of the goal is to attract new fans, you have to go beyond just the marketing to give them more access to the core music -- and focus on selling them on real reasons to buy something above and beyond the content.

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We're having a special Bad Hair Day podcast which is a mini-reprise of last night's meetup in Berkeley.

Marshall is off tonight. I'll have two guests -- Doug Kaye of spokenword.org and Joseph Scott of Automattic.

Doug is working on a podcast aggregator that supports rssCloud.

Doug also founded IT Conversations that was a focal point in the podcasting bootstrap at the beginning of the decade. The Gillmor Gang got its start on Doug's network; we were inspired by his work.

Joseph developed the plugin for Wordpress that shipped at the beginning of the week. I haven't known Joseph a very long time, but we've already had a spectacular success, imho.

We'll talk about many of the things that were discussed at last night's meetup.

And for this podcast we'll have an IRC chatroom:

irc://irc.freenode.net/#badHair

Tune in at 7PM Pacific!

Ask MAKE is a weekly column where we answer reader questions, like yours. Write them in to mattm@makezine.com or drop us a line on Twitter. We can't wait to tackle your conundrums!

Aaron writes in with a question about short-range sensors:

My question is really more of a search for direction. I have exhausted several approaches and could use advice. The goal is to create several simple, cheap sensors that have only the ability to sense that there is another one of them next to eachother. I need a range around 5 feet. It would need to have an id. For instance sensor 1 could see sensor 2 and 3 within 5 feet but no other and sensor 2 could see sensor 1 and 4, and so on.
I have considered rfid most intensly, but I find noise and cost go up at this range and I have had issues with consistancy. Laser requires line of site not be interrupted, blue tooth has too great a range, and so on.

Interesting question! I've actually been thinking about this for a project as well. There are three types of signal that I can imagine using for this application: RF, audio, and optical. Because you mention that maintaining line-of-sight is an issue, let's stick to a radio based solution. To make things simple, lets assume that each node is identical. Then, we need a protocol for each node to take turns transmitting their IDs to the other nodes. We also need to figure out how far away the transmitting node is, which we can estimate using the received signal strength if we make each node transmit at the same power. This is possible because radio waves follow the inverse square law.

Now, there are many different ways to build a radio system to do this, however a nice off-the-shelf part that will work is the xBee. Each node would then consist of a microcontroller (whichever you fancy) and an xBee radio. Program them so that they transmit their own ID at random intervals, and spend the rest of the time listening for other radio's IDs. Measure the signal strength of the received ID using the RSSI indicator, and if it is above a certain value (determine experimentally), then add the ID and time of reception to a list. If the same ID is received again, update that entry with the latest time a signal was received. Then, go through the list periodically, and remove any ID that hasn't been heard from in a while (longer than the longest time between random transmissions). This way, you will always have a list of devices that are nearby. By having them transmit their IDs at random intervals, you will minimize the chance that two transmit at the same time without having to deal with synchronization issues.

That's the easiest way I can think of to do this, however it is still pretty complex. Have a better solution? Sound off in the comments!

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Biz posted a list of changes to the terms of service.

They also published a draft of a short list of rules for developers.

Based on a quick read the changes seem reasonable, they reflect how the service is used and the role Twitter the company plays in it.

At long last:

The Prime Minister has released a statement on the Second World War code-breaker, Alan Turing, recognising the 'appalling' way he was treated for being gay. Alan Turing, a mathematician most famous for his work on breaking the German Enigma codes, was convicted of 'gross indecency' in 1952 and sentenced to chemical castration.

Treatment of Alan Turing was "appalling" - PM (number10.gov.uk)

Los Angeles tagger "Buket," aka, Cyrus Yazdani, was today sentenced to 3 years and 8 months in California state prison. He gained online fame when he tagged a sign over an LA freeway in broad daylight, and vandalized a bus.

Yazdani became something of an Internet sensation when he plastered his "Buket" bomb 20 feet above the busy Hollywood Freeway -- vandalism that was captured on videotape and posted with a rap soundtrack on YouTube and numerous tagger-related blogs.

Yazdani must also pay $117,196 in restitution fines.

Daredevil street artiste or reckless egomaniacal douchetard? Not sure. Either way, I feel badly for the guy. He's going to do that kind of prison time, for a nonviolent crime? Seems harsh. Maybe part of the logic was that he could have caused accidents in the freeway incident, leading to injury or death. But you can actually kill someone, under some circumstances, and do less time. Hash it out in the comments.

More: Los Angeles Times (today), LAist (from May, 2009).