UncleRage writes "I've been asked to research and ultimately recommend a deployment procedure for Macs across a rather large network. I'm not a stranger to OS X; however, the last time I worked on deployment NetRestore was still king of the mountain. Considering the current options, what methodologies do admins adhere to? Given the current selection of tools available, what would you recommend when planning, prototyping, and rolling out a robust, modular deployment scenario? For the record, I'm not asking for a spoon-fed solution; I'm more interested in a discussion concerning the current tools and what may (or may not) have worked for you. There are a lot of options available for modular system deployment... what are your opinions?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Olli Erkkilä created this custom concept bike as his graduation project from the Institute of Design in Lahti. [via Core77]

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Lily Allen, who last we saw was copying Techdirt to convince the world that copying was bad (it's bad!) and destroying the industry, has been trying to get some other UK musicians to speak up on her behalf as well. Singer James Blunt took the the UK's Times Online to speak out in support of Lily and kicking fans offline. His reasoning is quite puzzling, however:

The world over, people are stealing music in its millions in the form of illegal file-sharing. It's easy to do, and has become accepted by many, but people need to know that it is destroying people's livelihoods and suffocating emerging British artists.

The music business is made up of thousands of jobbing musicians, producers, mixers and engineers creating and shaping popular music and culture, but illegal file-sharing is cutting off the income from their work. Without the revenue from established artists, record labels cannot fund emerging musicians. They'll just re-master the Beatles albums again, because they can't afford to put an amazing new band into a studio to record something that may surpass Sergeant Pepper.

Now, considering how long file sharing has been popular, you might think we'd be seeing some effect by now, right? Except that the music industry's own economists in the UK recently did a study where they noted that the music industry has been growing. That's because it's easier and cheaper to create, promote and distribute music -- and that's opened up many new avenues for making money. So how is it killing the industry? Only in the minds of a few who don't know the facts.

Blunt goes on to support Peter Mandelson's plan to kick people off the internet for file sharing, without bothering to explain how that's likely to get people to want to keep giving money to musicians.

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Here are a few neat optical illusions built by magician Jerry Andrus.

He does not look happy. Another gem from Tom Nardone's ExtremePumpkins.com.

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lbalbalba writes "Heirs to comic book legend Jack Kirby sent 45 notices of copyright termination to Marvel Entertainment, prospective Marvel buyer Disney, Sony Pictures, Universal Pictures, 20th Century Fox, Paramount Pictures, and others studios that that hold licensed media rights to Marvel characters. Some rights could revert to the heirs as soon as 2014, for characters that are among the hottest in Hollywood: The Incredible Hulk, The Mighty Thor, Iron Man, Spider-Man, The Avengers, and others. Among other things the heirs' demand could cause problems for Disney's as yet unconsummated purchase of Marvel."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

As you hopefully recall, back in late 2007, a wonderful, informative and useful blog suddenly popped up on the scene, highlighting some of the worst abuses of the patent system by shell corporations suing companies that were actually innovating. This side of the patent dispute had never really received too much of a spotlight. While there were certainly complaints about "patent trolls" and about the fact that so many patent lawsuits were all being filed in eastern Texas, there was little attention actually being paid to who was behind these lawsuits and some of the sneakier tactics they used (such as a variety of shell companies to hide the true identity of who was behind the lawsuits). The anonymous Patent Troll Tracker blog did a really nice job turning a nice spotlight on some of these practices -- and that, of course, upset those who had made a nice little (actually, a huge multi-million dollar) business for themselves being involved in such lawsuits. They went crazy trying to dig up any and all information on who the anonymous blogger was, and eventually got him to reveal himself as Rick Frankel, a Cisco lawyer, by filing a defamation lawsuit against him. The issue was a blog post where he noted that a lawsuit had been filed on October 15th, 2007, even though the patent in question had not been issued until October 16th. Yet, even though the original documents showed an October 15th date, the date later changed to the 16th, raising reasonable questions about what happened, how the original date showed up and how it was changed.

The lawyers who had filed the lawsuit claimed that this was defamation, in that the posts accused them of a crime, and claimed all sorts of damages. They added Cisco to the lawsuit and the trial finally began last week. Joe Mullin is doing an amazing job reporting live from the trial, and has detailed the opening statements, Rick Frankel's testimony and the testimony of the lawyers accusing Frankel of defamation.

The East Texas patent lawyers are trying to paint a picture of some conspiracy theory to make them look bad, but it's difficult to see how that's supported. So far, it appears that the factual points that Frenkel noted were accurate. The filing did originally have the earlier date on it, and the court clerk was later convinced to change it. That, alone, is pretty suspicious -- and a point worth raising, as Frenkel did. No one seems to be disputing that. Instead, they're making it out to be a big conspiracy theory against them, and are claiming all sorts of emotional damage and that they were accused of being criminals (which Frenkel did not do), but haven't shown how there was any real harm. Instead, in the lawyers' testimony, they admit that when they saw the blog post, their first thought was "Let's get this shut down." In other words, on the stand, they admit that their lawsuit wasn't about defamation or harm, but about them trying to stifle free speech.

Who knows how the trial will end up, but from the testimony so far, it certainly looks like the lawyers are admitting that the case was really about exposing and silencing Frankel, rather than about any real "harm" done to them or their reputation.

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An anonymous reader writes "BRS Labs has created a technology it calls Behavioral Analytics which uses cognitive reasoning, much like the human brain, to process visual data and to identify criminal and terroristic activities. Built on a framework of cognitive learning engines and computer vision, AISight, provides an automated and scalable surveillance solution that analyzes behavioral patterns, activities and scene content without the need for human training, setup, or programming."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I'll give dollars to donuts that Jake von Slatt owns a Yaris because he likes to say "YAAAAAAAAAAARis" in a pirate voice. Anyhoo, Jake was tired of the 'Yota dealership hitting him for 50 bucks to replace the factory cabin air filter, so he hacked together his own from a $5 home A/C filter and wrote a good tutorial about how to do so yourself. Take that ye scallywags!

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John Young says:

This morning, some friends and I had a "Green2Steam" party, where we start with green coffee beans, roast them in a hot-air popper, grind them, and immediately brew them up in a siphon brewer over a camp stove. Boy, when coffee is _that_ fresh, just-roasted and just-ground, it smells like coffee from some other alternate dimension that's REAL-er than ours.

My high-school friend Chris Young (who played Bryce Lynch, Max Headroom's nerdy inventor, on the HBO series) made this video of the process; I thought you might like it!

As was rumored last week, FCC boss, Julius Genachowski, gave a speech where he pushes to have the FCC's "principles of network openness" codified into law. Basically, he's come out in support of a net neutrality law, giving the FCC the power to regulate the issue. In the speech, he suggests that the four principles that were already put forth by former FCC chair Michael Powell get two additions, and have all six codified as law. The first four are:

• Freedom to Access Content. First, consumers should have access to their choice of legal content
• Freedom to Use Applications. Second, consumers should be able to run applications of their choice.
• Freedom to Attach Personal Devices. Third, consumers should be permitted to attach any devices they choose to the connection in their homes.
• Freedom to Obtain Service Plan Information. Fourth, consumers should receive meaningful information regarding their service plans.

To that, Genachowski adds the following two:

• The fifth principle is one of non-discrimination -- stating that broadband providers cannot discriminate against particular Internet content or applications.
• The sixth principle is a transparency principle -- stating that providers of broadband Internet access must be transparent about their network management practices.

I have to admit that the sixth principle sounds a lot like the fourth, and the whole thing remains pretty vague. The more interesting bit is the plan to include wireless technologies in what's covered here, something the FCC hasn't paid nearly as much attention to in the past.

While I believe that the basic concept of a neutral internet is very important to keeping the internet as a platform for innovation, I have to admit that I'm quite nervous about any attempt to put it into the law. First, many are noting that the telcos will undoubtedly heavily lobby the process to make sure that the final legislation has plenty of loopholes and quid pro quo aspects in it. As Broadband Reports notes:

While anyone and everyone will participate, you can expect lobbyists for AT&T, Comcast and Verizon to continue to get the best seats. Be mindful that lobbyists will likely work very hard to make these principles as weak as possible so they can only be used in the most egregious instances of foul play. This is a perfect opportunity for telecom lobbyists to pre-empt tougher federal laws, that not coincidentally picked up steam in Congress last week.

Also be aware that when lobbyists see discussions of "transparency," their immediate thought is that it's a perfect opportunity to push harder for low usage caps and high per-byte overages. Mega-carriers believe that as long as they're facing expectations of honesty when it comes to network management, they might as well use the opportunity to their advantage in almost vindictive fashion. Expect the industry's continued dream of shifting from flat-rate pricing to metered billing to play a starring role as the rules get hashed out.

Not surprisingly, the broadband providers rushed out prepared statements that all start off with "applause" for Genachowski, followed by something rather different than applause... each positioning reasons for why putting such principles into law is a bad, bad idea. In other words, expect a big fight and any law to be greatly watered down.

My biggest fear, honestly, isn't in what happens with this particular law, but what happens down the road. I believe that Genachowski really is committed to reasonable internet principles. But once we've given the FCC a mandate to regulate how the internet works, then those laws can and will be updated and changed. What if the next FCC chair is a former telco exec -- certainly not outside the realm of possibility. Opening up that door is likely to result in some very bad legislation down the road.

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1sockchuck writes "We haven't yet seen signs of the Google Navy of seagoing data centers that use the ocean for power and cooling. But data center developers are planning to use sea water air conditioning in a new project on the island nation of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean. Cold water from deep-sea currents would be piped ashore to be used in a heat exchanger for the data center facility. A similar system has been used to replace the chillers at Cornell University, which draws cold water from Lake Cayuga. The Cornell system cost $50 million, but has slashed cooling-related energy usage by 86 percent."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Nicholas Wallen's tick-tock clock takes an interesting look at what constitutes a clock. Built using an Arduino, some stepper motors, and two homemade wheel displays, it constructs a two-phrase message that might have something to do with the current time. If it feels like it. From his website:

tick-talk is a clock that tells time. Given, it isn't an extraordinarily useful clock. Instead, it's how a person might tell time if s/he were asked to sit on a shelf or hang on a wall and say the time every few seconds. tick-talk gets lazy and will sometimes try to change the subject. Occasionally, tick-talk draws a blank.

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What kind of thing is holding the door open in this photo of a residence for sale in Finland? (Via Lovely Listing)

snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Paul Venezia takes issue with the all-too-familiar practice of management dictating IT solutions to admins savvy enough to know the fiat revolves around far inferior products, in this case Nissan North America's embracing of Microsoft's Hyper-V. 'Very rarely do unilateral decisions by CIOs make for solid IT infrastructures, and they are generally at odds with what the admins on the ground are communicating,' Venezia writes, noting that upper managers who succumb to vendor tricks face a far worse fate than an infrastructure based on inferior technology — one devoid of the kind of expertise necessary to make the best of their flawed purchasing decisions. 'If continuously faced with the specter of having to implement and support clearly inferior products due to baffling, uneducated management decisions, top-flight admins will simply head elsewhere.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I have to admit that this story seems so bizarre that I'm not quite sure I believe it. A bunch of folks have been submitting the news that the Nigerian government is apparently so upset by a Sony Playstation commercial that it's demanding an apology from Sony for allegedly "portraying Nigeria as a home of fraud where its citizens hardly do genuine business." Must be quite a commercial right? The only problem is that the commercial does no such thing: It just mentions, in passing, as a part of the joke of the commercial that "You can't believe everything you read on the Internet. Otherwise I'd be a Nigerian millionaire by now." I don't quite see how that implies that Nigerian citizens hardly do genuine business. It just suggests that there are Nigerian scammers out there -- which is hardly something the government can credibly deny. Hell, there are popular songs in Nigeria all about fleecing dumb Americans in online scams. Honestly, the whole complaint from the Nigerian gov't seems so odd, that it feels like part of Sony's marketing campaign...

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The New York Times ran a long list of last words spoken by inmates in Texas before they were executed. Here are the first few:

Nothing I can say can change the past.

I done lost my voice.

I would like to say goodbye.

My heart goes is going ba bump ba bump ba bump.

Is the mike on?

I don’t have anything to say. I am just sorry about what I did.

I am nervous and it is hard to put my thoughts together. Sometimes you don’t know what to say.

Man, there is a lot of people there.

I have come here today to die, not make speeches.

Where’s Mr. Marino’s mother? Did you get my letter?

I want to ask if it is in your heart to forgive me. You don’t have to.

I wish I could die more than once to tell you how sorry I am.

Could you please tell that lady right there — can I see her? She is not looking at me — I want you to understand something, hold no animosity toward me. I want you to understand. Please forgive me.

Last Words

And you thought those kids were mean to your pumpkin last year.

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TechnologyResource writes "Sony Ericsson has just introduced the MH907 headphones. The headphones will pause or play your music based on contact; eliminating the use of a pause or stop button. Removing one ear bud will pause the music. Removing both ear buds will stop the music. Both ear buds have to be in your ear to play the music. According to Sony Ericsson, this will allow you to 'play your music and answer phone calls just by inserting the buds into your ear or taking them out.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The folks over at TorrentFreak alerted me to the news that singer Lily Allen, who made some news last week for speaking out against file sharing and against artists who have defended file sharing, has put up a blog, called "It's Not Alright," to talk about this particular subject. In one of her very first posts, she reposted an entire Techdirt post about 50 Cents' view on piracy and how it's part of the marketing. Allen goes on to then say that this is not alright and that 50 Cent is being selfish and isn't thinking about everyone else. But what's quite odd is that Ms. Allen, while complaining about such unfair copying, seemed to have absolutely no problem with copying my entire Techdirt post -- without credit or a link. As I said when asked by TorrentFreak for my response:

I think it's wonderful that Lily Allen found so much value in our Techdirt post that she decided to copy -- or should I say "pirate"? -- the entire post. The fact that she is trying to claim that such copying is bad, while doing it herself suggests something of a double standard, unfortunately. Also, for someone so concerned about the impact of "piracy" I'm quite surprised that she neither credited nor linked to our post. Apparently, what she says and how she acts are somewhat different. Still, Lily, glad we could help you make a point... even if it wasn't the one you thought you were making. Feel free to use any of our posts going forward as well. Unlike some, we're not scared of people copying our stuff. By the way, does this mean we can post her music to our site without crediting her now, too?

Enigmax, in his TorrentFreak post put it nicely as well:

Lilly, in isolation we don't think your copyright infringement is a big deal at all and neither does Mike, but in the arena of this debate it's still quite important. Infringing copyright these days is so easy to do, most people manage it every day in one way or another, and you are clearly no different. You probably didn't mean any harm or even give it a second thought but half a dozen clicks later and you're a pirate these days I'm afraid.

The next thing you know you've got God-knows-who accusing you in public of being an evil copyright infringer and telling you the sky's falling in. Oh, you're on your first strike now by the way. A couple more and it'll be off to Ofcom for disconnection for you young lady....

That said, I also think it's worth responding to Allen's attempted "point" in response to 50's comments:

this is particularly selfish in my view, he seems to only be thinking of how piracy effects him. What about the guys that work in the studio and the kids that run around town putting his posters up,the people that designed his artwork, the people that run his website. Is he giving them a cut of his live fee?

Wait... since when did any of those people get a cut of album sales? Really. None of them do. They all get paid regular fees for their work... and that doesn't change if 50 is making all his money from album sales or concerts. So, yes, they actually do get a cut of his "live fee." It comes in the form of regular payment for services... the same as if it were coming from album sales. And, if 50 is making even more money from those live shows, he can still afford to pay the studio guys, the street teams, the art designers and his web gurus more. So what point is Lily Allen making again? Because so far I can't figure it out...

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Photojojo! Insanely Great Photo Projects and DIY Ideas by Amit Gupta with Kelly Jensen
Book Site: Photojojo.com/book

The best email newsletter hands down for photography crafts is Photojojo. Thanks to Amit's review one year, I found my Nikon D40 and have been in love with taking photos ever since. Now Amit and Kelly wow us again with their new book, Photojojo! Insanely Great Photo Projects and DIY Ideas filled with 50 projects so you can do more with all the cool photos you take. It's not just about printing them out and making a photo album. This book shows you how to use your photos to make cool things such as a lampshade or messenger bag (pictured below).The second half of the book is like taking a photography class. You'll learn techniques for taking better photos as well as fun ways you can experiment with different photo techniques. I love the tips on how to do digital color correcting after you've taken your photos. If you love taking photos and want to learn how to do more with them, this book is for you!

Book Giveaway Time!
We are giving away 3 copies of the Photojojo! book.Just leave a comment in this post and tell us why you need this book. Please make sure you include your email address in the comment form field (won't be published). All comments will be closed by Noon PST on Wednesday, September 23rd. The lucky winners will be announced next week on the site. Good luck!

Project: Ginormous Photo Mosaics
Even if you are living in an apartment and can't put holes in your walls, you can still get some great art up. Download the project PDF to make this stunning photo mosaic where you'll be able to see the wonderful memories you have of your friend and family.

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ArmyofGnomes writes "FCC chairman Julius Genachowski delivered Monday on President Obama's promise to back 'net neutrality' — but he went much further than merely seeking to expand rules that prohibit ISPs from filtering or blocking net traffic by proposing that they cover all broadband connections, including data connections for smartphones. Genachowski stated: 'I understand the Internet is a dynamic network and that technology continues to grow and evolve. I recognize that if we were to create unduly detailed rules that attempted to address every possible assault on openness, such rules would become outdated quickly. But the fact that the Internet is evolving rapidly does not mean we can, or should, abandon the underlying values fostered by an open network, or the important goal of setting rules of the road to protect the free and open Internet. ... In view of these challenges and opportunities, and because it is vital that the Internet continue to be an engine of innovation, economic growth, competition and democratic engagement, I believe the FCC must be a smart cop on the beat preserving a free and open Internet.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

As fashion designers in the US are, once again, pushing for a misguided new "fashion copyright," it's worth remembering that studies have repeatedly shown that knock off fashions are what help make the fashion industry so successful. They serve a few different purposes. They make the authentic versions appear more valuable (who would knockoff an unpopular fashion?). They help differentiate the market by letting the clothes diffuse to the lower end that would never buy the designer level clothes, and they push designers to keep innovating each year, because they want to keep coming out with something new to stay ahead of the counterfeiters.

Now, it appears that at least one clothing designer decided to use these facts to its own advantage. ReallyEvilCanine writes in to let us know how a South African t-shirt designer made its own counterfeit line of t-shirts and used that to boost the perception of the original line, while also being able to differentiate and sell into different markets: The brand, Love Jovi, created the "knockoffs" using the name Luv Jovi, and plenty of people picked up on it, at times lamenting how the Love Jovi people must be upset, but noting that "all the biggest brands" get copied. The Love Jovi people let the whole experiment run for about two years before revealing it. However, in the process, they showed that rather than worrying about counterfeits and fakes, there's something to be said for cornering the market on such things yourself. As REC noted in the submission, even when counterfeiters don't "play fair," you can still sell looooooots of t-shirts.

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Congratulations to everyone who helped put on the Maker Faire Rhode Island, it was a smashing success! Attendees played mini golf, conversed over the latest tin can telephones, tried on monster costumes, soldered up their own gadgets, played some music, and overall had a great time! Missed out on the fun? Check out the Flickr pool for more photos of the event, and be sure to follow the MAKER Events calender to find the next gathering in your area!

Photo Credits (clockwise from left): Phil Torrone, no_id_i_want, David Nunez, Matt Mets

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enigma48 writes to mention that a collaborative study between the Universities of Buenos Aires and Cambridge have demonstrated that individuals in a vegetative state can still learn and demonstrate at least a partial consciousness. Their findings are reported in a recent online edition of Nature Neuroscience. "It is the first time that scientists have tested whether patients in vegetative and minimally conscious states can learn. By establishing that they can, it is believed that this simple test will enable practitioners to assess the patient's consciousness without the need of imaging. The abstract is also available in the advance issue of Nature."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Theeviljeremy sez, "My friend Damien-- one of those bafflingly creative types-- created this hand carved chess set. I had a chance to see the figures in person the other day, and the level of detail is really incredible. I particularly like the queen of the village, with a chainsaw at her side and a shotgun hidden behind her back, but there are a lot of standouts on both sides of the board."

Zombies vs Villagers chess set (Thanks, Theeviljeremy!)

Cappi Williamson of The New Yorker says:

In “A Life of Its Own," Michael Specter explores the opportunities and challenges posed by the emerging field of synthetic biology. “No scienti?c achievement has promised so much, and none has come with greater risks or clearer possibilities for deliberate abuse,” Specter writes. Synthetic biologists “see cells as hardware, and genetic code as the software required to make them run,” he notes. “By using gene-sequence information and synthetic DNA, they are attempting to recon?gure the metabolic pathways of cells to perform entirely new functions, such as manufacturing chemicals and drugs.”

One team of biologists, led by Jay Keasling at Berkeley, has had great success with amorphadine, the precursor to the malaria medicine artemisinin: they constructed a microbe to manufacture the compound, and by 2012 they will have produced enough artemisinin that the cost for a course of treatment will drop from as much as ten dollars to less than a dollar. “We have got to the point in human history where we simply do not have to accept what nature has given us,” Keasling tells Specter. He envisions a much larger expansion of the discipline, engineering cells to manufacture substances like biofuels.

Another scientist, Drew Endy of Stanford, has collaborated with colleagues to start the BioBricks Foundation, a nonpro?t organization formed to register and develop standard parts for assembling DNA. Endy predicts that if synthetic biology succeeds, “our ultimate solution to the crisis of health-care costs will be to redesign ourselves so that we don’t have so many problems to deal with,” but he also acknowledges the risks inherent in the field. Synthetic biology, Endy tells Specter, is “the coolest platform science has ever produced, but the questions it raises are the hardest to answer.” Yet he also argues that “the potential is great enough, I believe, to convince people it’s worth the risk.” Specter writes, “The planet is in danger, and nature needs help.” While biological engineering will never “solve every problem we expect it to solve,” he writes, “what worked for artemisinin can work for many of the products our species will need to survive.”

(Illustration by Joost Swarte)

Where will synthetic biology lead us?

Over the summer, we wrote about an important lawsuit under appeal at the Federal Circuit, Prometheus Laboratories v. Mayo Collaborative Services, which looked at whether or not basic medical tests could be patented -- in this case, a method of calibrating medicine dosages based on a patient's metabolic response. Doctors were pretty freaked out by this idea that you could patent a method that seemed like basic science. While a lower court agreed, the appeals court has gone the other way and said that the method is patentable. The patent holders insisted that this patent was necessary because if it didn't get the patent it "would likely have a chilling effect on future medical discovery." That, of course, is ridiculous. The idea that you need a patent on basic diagnostic procedures to have people come up with them is ridiculous. Some think that there's a decent chance the Supreme Court will take up this case as well, but until then, we've got yet another case of patents being used to actively put lives at risk by telling doctors they can't do basic diagnostic procedures without paying up.

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Klaudiusz Golos and Sebastion Mikuciuk created this upside down house for an exhibit in Trassenheide, Germany. It's clearly unlivable still a lot of fun. "Crazy Upside Down House in Germany" (Thanks, Lindsay Tiemeyer!)

Techdirt is reporting that Malaysia seems to be jumping on the copyright/trademark bandwagon and attempting to protect the "ownership" of certain ethnic foods. Of course, this may just be a massive PR push in an attempt to grab some eyeballs. "Last year, around this time, we noted that the country of Lebanon was trying to claim that it owns hummus and other middle eastern foods, such as falafel, tabouleh and baba gannouj, and that no other country could produce them. It seems that other parts of the world are seeing the same sort of thing, as Malaysia is trying to declare that it owns popular Malaysian dishes, like nasi lemak."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Brian Eno, or as he is known to many in my office "God" has released his second iPhone App. A followup to Bloom, this one is called Trope and supposedly creates darker music. You create music by drawing shapes on the iPhone's screen.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Smithsonian posted an absolutely breathtaking gallery of images taken by space probes over the last decade. From Smithsonian:

The Cassini spacecraft, which is now orbiting Saturn, looked back toward the eclipsed Sun and saw a view unlike any other. The rings of Saturn light up so much that new rings were discovered.

"Fantastic Photos of our Solar System"

Jesse Brown, a BoingBoing guest blogger, is the host of TVO's Search Engine podcast.

When we got out of college, my buddy Josh Dolgin and I set out to make an eight-minute cartoon. We figured it would take us three months. The plan was to use the cartoon to get a TV show and become rich and famous. None of this came to pass.

Instead, we spent three years making a 45-minute weirdo sci-fi hiphop buddy film. We nearly lost our minds and our friendship in the process. The resulting cartoon (we were told) was too strange for TV and too long for film festivals. The whole thing amounted to nothing: a fiasco, a waste of time. Had we spent three years playing with Lego and poking each other in the gums, it would have been just as productive. We ended up selling a 25-minute cut of the thing to the CBC, who never aired it, and then we got as far away from each other as possible. Josh went on to international success as the Hiphop-Klezmer weirdo Socalled, and I became a public radio host.

The other week I watched 500 Pound Planet for the first time in five years. I was afraid it would make me cringe, but it didn't. I like our cartoon! It's messy and ambling, but I think it's got soul and does a pretty good job of capturing what our lives in Montreal were like at the time. Instead of feeling guilty about wasting three years making it, I now feel guilty at having abandoned it. Parents should treat their kids better than that, even if they're deformed. Especially if they're deformed.

So enough preamble. Here is part one of our bastard cartoon, 500 Pound Planet. I'll post the rest, a chapter a day over the week. Hope you like it, feedback welcome!

Well, this is odd. Back in March, some book publishers and authors started blaming Scribd for hosting infringing scanned and uploaded books. Of course, they ignored the fact that Scribd is quite aggressive in taking down any infringing content that it discovers, and has a filtering system to try to catch as much as possible. Under any reasonable reading of the DMCA, Scribd is protected under the safe harbors. It's not doing the actual infringing itself, but providing a tool, and it appears to go above and beyond the legal requirements in trying to help authors and publishers.

Yet, given that noise back in March, you had to know that a lawsuit was brewing, and it's not too surprising to find out that the first one filed is a class action attempt. What is surprising, however, is that the lawyers bringing the case, Joe Sibley and Kiwi Camara, are the same lawyers who represented Jammie Thomas in her recent loss to the record labels. Camara and Sibley, in that case, failed to do some of the most basic things you would have expected in such a defense (though, they were brought on to her defense just before the trial began).

Their argument against Scribd doesn't seem to make much sense at all:

"Under the aegis of self-promoting misinterpretations of federal statutes," the lawyers wrote in their complaint, "the West Coast technology industry has produced a number of start-up firms premised on the notion that commercial copyright infringement is not illegal, unless and until the injured party discovers and complains of the infringing activity, and (the) infringer fails to respond to such complaints."

That's simply not true in any sense of what they describe. None of the companies -- Scribd included -- is claiming that infringement is not against the law. They're just saying -- and the law pretty clearly reflects this -- that it is not their liability for infringements done by users. No one is denying the right of the copyright holders to go after those who actually did the uploading. Camara and Sibley seem to be making up a strawman that completely ignores the actual arguments. They continue:

"Apparently (the West Coast start-ups) believe any business may misappropriate and then publish intellectual property, as long as it ceases to use a stolen work when an author complains...Many millions of dollars have been invested in this business plan."

Again, this is simply incorrect. The businesses themselves are not doing the "misappropriating" or the "publishing." That's the entire reason for the safe harbors in the DMCA, to recognize the difference between a tool provider and a user. That these lawyers can't understand the same difference is highly questionable -- especially right after a court set Universal Music straight on the very same issue. People keep acting as if the DMCA safe harbors mean that copyright infringement is somehow not enforced, but that's a plainly wrong understanding of what's happening in the world. The entire point of the safe harbors is to make sure that the correct party is liable. It still amazes me that otherwise intelligent people can't seem to recognize this distinction.

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US photographic trade body PMA and dpreview.com are conducting a survey looking for the views of dedicated amateur photographers. The five-minute survey asks about your photographic use, the features you'd like to see in cameras and your use and experience of photo sharing sites and printing services. It aims to get a clearer understanding of what committed non-professional photographers want from their cameras and related services and may even result in those things getting a bit better. Responses will be discussed at the forthcoming 6Sight conference.

Ellen Klages' young adult novel White Sands, Red Menace is quiet, magnificent, heartbreaking and inspirational. It's the story of Dewey and Suze, two girls growing up in Alamogordo after the end of WWII. They are both the children of atomic scientists from the Los Alamos project, and have found themselves in a period of weird and fragile peace after V-J day.

But the peace is only a skin stretched thin over a hundred bubbling tensions: Suze's mom has formed a league of atomic scientists against nuclear proliferation while her father has gone to work on the space program, ready to forgive the Nazi scientists he's working alongside if it means that he gets to play with giant sexy toys and fight Commies. Dewey -- a girl-inventor whose delightful ingenuity is the progeny of Heinlein's Have Spacesuit, Will Travel and a Cherry Ames novel -- is forced into "girl" classes at school and has to come to grips with her bespectacled awkwardness. Suze befriends a Mexican girl from Little Chihuahua and is delighted by the family's old artist grandmother, who tutors her on craftmaking; but she is also forced to confront the racial inequality in whitewashed New Mexico.

Set in the fascinating period right after the war, when "atomic" meant "new and exciting" and when empowered women had yet to be shoehorned all the way back into their kitchens, White Sands, Red Menace has the sweet and evocative nostalgia of Ray Bradbury; the ingenuity and sprightly pace of a Heinlein juvenile; and the sneaky and thought-provoking politics of PD James. Klages has pulled off the impossible: a moving, deeply political novel that both cherishes and critiques the American century. It is an extraordinary and moving book.

White Sands, Red Menace is the sequel to the 2006 The Green Glass Sea, though it stands alone just fine. But you should read 'em both.

White Sands, Red Menace

Researchers have developed an "on/off" switch for implantable drug delivery systems that uses an external magnet to trigger the internal release of the medicine. The half-inch implant stores the drug inside a nanoengineered membrane containing magnetitie. An external magnetic field causes the membrane's pores to open up. Children's Hospital Boston physician Daniel Kohane and his colleagues published their experiments in the scientific journal Nano Letters. From Children's Hospital Boston:

"A device of this kind would allow patients or their physicians to determine exactly when drugs are delivered, and in what quantities," says Kohane, who directs the Laboratory for Biomaterials and Drug Delivery in the Department of Anesthesiology at Children's.

In animal experiments, the membranes remained functional over multiple cycles. The size of the dose was controllable by the duration of the "on" pulse, and the rate of release remained steady, even 45 days after implantation.

Testing indicated that drug delivery could be turned on with only a 1 to 2 minute time lag before drug release, and turned off with a 5 to 10 minute time lag.

Using magnetism to turn drugs on and off

An anonymous reader writes "Dangerous Prototype's #twatch is a DIY network appliance that displays real-time topic trends from Twitter. It can also show system statistics, RSS feeds, mail notifications, and more using a TCP server on port 1337 that accepts commands from LCD control programs like LCD Smartie (Windows) and LCDproc (Linux). Everything you need to build your own is on the project's page. We've covered this hardware hacker's work previously."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich's new $1.2 billion yacht has a laser anti-photography screen that targets cameras:

It might not seem like somebody with such ostentatious tastes would crave privacy, but along with these expensive toys, Ambramovich has installed an anti-paparazzi "shield". Lasers sweep the surroundings and when they detect a CCD, they fire a bolt of light right at the camera to obliterate any photograph. According to the Times, these don't run all the time, so friends and guests should still be able to grab snaps. Instead, they will be activated when guards spot the scourge of professional photography, paparazzi, loitering nearby.

We dig it, although the British courts might not be so pleased. UK photo magazine Amateur Photographer asked a London lawyer about the legalities of destroying photos from afar. Here's what he said: "intermeddling with goods belonging to someone else, or altering their condition, is a trespass to goods and will entitle the photographer to claim compensation without having to prove loss."

Russian Billionaire Installs Anti-Photo Shield on Giant Yacht

You won't be seeing Collin's smiling face around these parts for the next three weeks, but that's because he's getting married! Congrats to Collin and Erica from all of us here at MAKE! We'll miss you while you're gone, but we're so so happy for you.

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Melbourne artist Martin Harris paints lovely tiny watercolors inspired by children's books, toys, and 1960s television. His latest series, titled Toytown, is hanging at Melbourne's Outré Gallery through October 6. (Above: "Toytown Industrial Estate," 34. 5 x 24.5 cm; "Science Library Vol. 1," 6.5 x 9 cm; "Little Gothic Library Vol. 4 The Raven," 8.5 x 10 cm) Martin Harris at Outré Gallery (Thanks, Kirsten Anderson!)

Recently on Offworld we took an in-depth look at the games coming to both Wii and DS throughout the beginning of 2010 that you should be paying attention to (above), including new versions of Maxis's Spore -- which has just received a new, surprisingly full featured Flash version of its Creature Creator utility for your web perusal, in anticipation of the upcoming games. We also saw indie fave Infinite Ammo show off an affecting debut video of their upcoming puppet-girl opus Marian, as Team Meat also debut the first trailer for their brutal WiiWare platformer Super Meat Boy: a must see for its all-replays-at-once feature demo near the end. Elsewhere the animators at Aardman take on the DS's new sketchbook cartoon app, Rez and Lumines creators Q unveil a love-connection-puzzle game for iPhone, a man brilliantly mods Half Life 2 to use only mouth-sounds, James Kochalka's Game Boy Advance album hits iTunes, and Taito unveils an arcade game that simulates the impotent rage of the angry dad. And our 'one shot's: Nathan Barley/Dead Set's Charlie Brooker gets into games, Konjak captures the end of Mario's quest, our well-spent childhoods, and open season on invaders.

A massive letter-writing and email campaign has saved Philadelphia's Free Library System from closure, just days before it was scheduled to shut forever:

Just minutes ago, the Pennsylvania State senate passed bill 1828 by a vote of 32 to 17. For all of you who have been following the saga over the city's budget crisis, this is indeed the legislation that was needed for the City of Philadelphia to avoid the "Doomsday" Plan C budget scenario, which would have resulted in the layoff of 3,000 city employees and forced the closing of all libraries.

We are enormously grateful to everyone who advocated on our behalf. More than 2,000 letters to state legislators were collected from our libraries, and countless others made calls and sent emails underscoring how important public libraries are to the economic, educational and social life of our city. We also thank our incredible library staff, who despite the threat of imminent layoffs continued to provide excellent service to the thousands of people who use one of the 54 libraries in our system.

Breaking News - Legislation to keep libraries open passes! (via Consumerist)

Fred sez, "I've just launched a project on Kickstarter to fund the production, via crowd sourcing, of a never-before-released translation of Herman Melville's classic Moby Dick in Japanese emoji icons. Here's an example of an Emoji sentence from Moby Dick:

"I need to raise enough money to pay for each of Moby Dick's 6,438 sentences to be translated 3 times by different Amazon Mechanical Turk workers. Those results will then be voted on by another set of workers, and the most popular version of each sentence will be selected for inclusion in the book. Supporters can pledge varying amounts to get their name included in the book, a CC BY-SA licensed PDF, the raw data, and either a softcover black and white copy or a limited edition color version."

Emoji Dick (Thanks, Fred!)

Daniel Jones, a 23-year-old Jedi in England, claims that supermarket Tesco discriminated against him by demanding he remove his hood if he wanted to shop there. Jones is the founder of the International Church of Jediism. However, the Force of humor may be stronger with Tesco. From The Guardian:

"You have a choice of wearing headwear in your home or at work but you have to wear a cover for your head when you are in public," (Jones said.) He said he'd gone to the store to buy something to eat during his lunch break when staff approached him and ordered him to the checkout where they explained he would have to remove the offending hood or leave the store...

Tesco said: "He hasn't been banned. Jedis are very welcome to shop in our stores although we would ask them to remove their hoods.

"Obi-Wan Kenobi, Yoda and Luke Skywalker all appeared hoodless without ever going over to the Dark Side and we are only aware of the Emperor as one who never removed his hood. "If Jedi walk around our stores with their hoods on, they'll miss lots of special offers."

"Jedi religion founder accuses Tesco of discrimination over rules on hoods" (Thanks, Carlo Longino!)

Nyall writes "So a bunch of TI calculator programming enthusiasts got together to factor the keys Texas Instruments uses to sign the operating system binaries for the ti83+ (a z80 architecture) and the ti89/v200 (a 68k architecture) series of calculators. Now Texas Instruments is sending out DMCA notices to take them down."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Nyall writes "So a bunch of TI calculator programming enthusiasts got together to factor the keys Texas Instruments uses to sign the operating system binaries for the ti83+ (a z80 architecture) and the ti89/v200 (a 68k architecture) series of calculators. Now Texas Instruments is sending out DMCA notices to take them down."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Last year, around this time, we noted that the country of Lebanon was trying to claim that it owns hummus and other middle eastern foods, such as falafel, tabouleh and baba gannouj, and that no other country could produce them. It seems that other parts of the world are seeing the same sort of thing, as Malaysia is trying to declare that it owns popular Malaysian dishes, like nasi lemak. It doesn't seem entirely clear what this means, and the article is a bit vague (the title mentions "copyright," but the rest of the article does not). Still, it's certainly yet another sign of the times, when it feels natural to some people to do totally ridiculous things in claiming "ownership" of ideas.

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schliz writes "MIT researchers have successfully embedded a gallium nitride layer onto silicon to create a hybrid microchip. The method could be further developed to combine other technologies such as spintronics and optoelectronics on a silicon chip. It is expected to be commercialized in a couple of years, and allow manufacturers to keep up with Moore's Law despite today's shrinking devices."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

When tr.im announced that it was going open source, I said I would also release the code of the app that does my Top 40 page and that of Jay Rosen, Kevin Tofel and Zach Seward.

TopTwits is that app. It runs as an OPML Editor tool. This means you must have the OPML Editor installed on your machine, and then install topTwits.root in the OPML Editor.

alphadogg writes "Dell has agreed to buy Perot Systems for around $3.9 billion in cash, and intends to make the company its global services delivery division, the companies said Monday.The deal will allow Dell to expand its range of IT services, and potentially allow it to sell more hardware to existing Perot customers, it said. Dell's rival Hewlett-Packard expanded its own global services unit with the acquisition of EDS for $13.9 billion in May 2008. Over the last four quarters, Dell and Perot together had revenue of $16 billion from enterprise hardware and IT services, with $8 billion coming from enhanced services and support, Dell said. Perot's contribution to that is relatively small: In 2008, the company reported total revenue of $2.78 billion."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It's my pleasure to welcome guest contributing writer Pete Edwards to MAKE! Edwards is a circuit bending pioneer living in Troy, NY. He builds experimental electronic musical instruments for a living through his business casperelectronics. -Becky

I've been bread boarding lots of effects pedal circuits lately and have been struggling with the tangle of off board jacks and pots. The audio jacks are especially troublesome since the heavy guitar cables have a tendency of pulling the jack wires right off of the board.

I decided to make things A LOT easier on myself and designed a special board with built in jacks and pots. I loved the board so much that I built 3 more. The main "selling point" of this thing, beside the fact that it securely holds all of your hardware, is the way that the pots are mounted leaving the lugs exposed for easy connection. The thought of designing a circuit without one of these now makes me dizzy.

The project pictured above is a rebuild of the DroneLab drone synthesizer and FX processor. PCBs coming soon!!!* It has 19 pots and 10 switches. It's too big for the boards I had already built and I knew it would be insane to prototype this thing with loose components, so I made 6 hardware harnesses to hold all of the goods.

Below is a diagram of the harness. It's made to be somewhat modular. The holes on the top can hold pots, switches, LEDs, etc.... The holes on the back are especially well suited for audio and power jacks and maybe a switch or two.

The harnesses are best made from 1/32" steel. Aluminum will work too but may be a bit flimsy. The only catch is that you really need a metal bending tool to make these. A drill press is pretty important too. I got a small metal break NEW for $50. Cheap and oh so useful. I never knew how much a metal break could improve my life!

* Chris Scully (of Electromagics) and I have been tirelessly working on a new DroneLab design which we plan on releasing as a PCB late October with a parts kit to follow. More info and a pre-order form will be posted at casperelectronics.com in the next few weeks.

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Hugh sez, "This school in Bangladesh has tunnels for reading and playing and sunny, colorful porches. They can be built by hand by the people of the village (including the kids who will attend). The young designer, Anna Heringer, is a finalist for the Curry Stone Design Prize, given to individuals or groups for design solutions that addresses social justice."

Handmade Building (Thanks, Hugh!)

(Image: Kurt Hörbst)

AlbionTourgee writes "It is reported that Gmail and Yahoo mail at least have been blocked in Iran, along with many English-language sites. While news of demonstrations seems to be getting out of the country, the government appears to be trying to prevent people within Iran from communicating and from learning what's happening. It remains to be seen whether TOR and Freenets can be effective to combat this sort of effort to block communications, and whether the general circulation of information about the protests around the world will help."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Mathew Ingram points us to the news that President Obama has indicated that he's at least open to hearing bills that would help bailout the newspaper industry because he's afraid of reporting becoming "all blogosphere":

"I am concerned that if the direction of the news is all blogosphere, all opinions, with no serious fact-checking, no serious attempts to put stories in context, that what you will end up getting is people shouting at each other across the void but not a lot of mutual understanding."

That seems like an odd way to characterize things. First, it seems odd to lump the medium in with a certain type of reporting. There are plenty of "real reporters" who do plenty of "serious fact-checking" within the blog world too. Blogs are just a publishing medium. Yes, because there's a lower barrier to entry, you do end up with a much larger absolute number of bloggers, many of whom are just giving opinion. But the idea that there aren't blogging reporters is pure folly. In fact, I'd argue that the serious blogs on certain subjects to a lot more to "put stories in context" than your average newspaper reporter, who writes up a quick take and moves on to the next big thing. Topic-specific blogs are often much more accurate, much more detailed, and much more willing to focus on context than newspaper reporting. So why rescue one bunch of reporters, just because they happen to print on paper?

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Jesse Brown, a BoingBoing guest blogger, is the host of TVO's Search Engine podcast.

My friend Corey Mintz is so proud of his well-stocked, spotless refrigerator that he sends pictures of its interior to girls he's wooing and has used it in place of a headshot on his online dating profile (high-rez link).

Now, this is no ordinary fridge- Corey is a chef and food writer (a good one, for the Toronto Star) so his fridge is filled with wonderful delights- top-notch doggie-bags, fancy mustards, homemade pickles and the occasional action figure. He obsessively packages and labels his sauces and glazes and eliminates any item at the first sight or smell of rottenness. He's actually indexed and published his fridge's contents (link).

But I still contend that a clean icebox does not a man make. Corey insists otherwise- he thinks these pics provoke the same response in women that nude shots inspire in men.

So ladies, I put the question to you: does this fridge turn you on?

Just Posted! Our review of the Sigma DP2. Sigma was the first company brave enough to put a large sensor in a compact body and its DP1 was an interesting, if flawed creation. The DP2 is its second attempt - featuring a 41mm equivalent F2.8 lens and a series of improvements derived from the company's experiences with the DP1. However, it is no longer the only compact camera claiming to offer 'the power of DSLR' so can the DP2 see off the interlopers and does its unique sensor design give it hidden depths?

oranghutan writes "The language used to power most of the world's ATMs, COBOL, is turning 50. It also runs about 75 per cent of the world's business applications, so COBOL should be celebrated for making it to half a century. In cricketing terms, that's a good knock. The author says: 'COBOL's fate was decided during a meeting of the Short Range Committee, the organization responsible for submitting the first version of the language in 1959. The meeting was convened after a meeting at the Pentagon first laid down the guidelines for the language. Half a century later, Micro Focus published research which showed people still use COBOL at least 10 times throughout the course of an average working day in Australia. Only 18 per cent of those surveyed, however, had ever actually heard of COBOL.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I'm doing a live audio- and text-chat today at 3PM EDT with Internet Evolution's new IE Radio program. Hope to chat with you!

Cory Doctorow, blogger, Boing Boing

Here's a super-nerdy timepiece created using Arduino, a DS1307 real-time clock chip, four 74HC595 shift registers, and an 8x8 RGB dot matrix display. How does it tell time?

The time is indicated using blocks of colour. The central 6x6 grid is split into 4 x (3x3) grids and each 3x3 block is a different colour. The number of LEDs per 3x3 grid indicate the digit. i.e. if the first 3x3 grid has 1 LED lit then the first digit is 1, the second has 7 then the 2nd digit is 7, etc. The top two grids are the hour digits and the bottom 2 the minutes. Around the edge the unused LED's have a moving light that shows the approximate position of the seconds.

Got that?

The BlokClok Project

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pickens writes "The Telegraph reports that a new wristwatch called num8 has a GPS tracking device and satellite positioning system concealed inside so parents can locate the wearer to within 10 feet with Google maps. The watch sends an alert if it is forcibly removed. The makers of the watch claim it gives peace of mind to parents and makes children more independent. 'Losing your child, if only for a brief moment, leads to a state of panic and makes parents feel powerless. The overriding aim of num8 is to give children their freedom and parents peace of mind,' says a company spokesman. Critics of the watch say tagging children is a step too far in paranoia about child safety. 'Is the world really that unsafe that parents need to track their children electronically? I don't think so,' says Dr Michele Elliott, director of children's charity Kidscape."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

4ms shows off the proto for their upcoming bassline module, part of the "Andromeda Space Rockers" series -

The Autonomous Bassline Generator creates deterministic bassline patterns in a sci-fi retro sound by generating melodies on the fly, based on a knob. It's just an AVR (attiny44) chip doing all the work, plus an opamp to act as the filter (photocell). The blue button is Tap Tempo, or if you hold it down for 1 second, it syncs up to the pulses on the IR receiver (this lets you beat-sync multiple Andromeda Space Rocker modules). The red button lets you edit a single note in the melody. Pulse-width modulation is currently pre-set to a certain envelope, but that will become user-controllable soon!

No source/schematics as of yet, but we'll keep an eye on 4msPedals for updates. Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Music | Digg this!

If you've ever been stuck on a cross-country flight and needed something to prop up your mobile while you watched a movie, then you'll love this clever adjustable folding stand from the creator of the iPhone Paper Clip Stand. The design itself is ripe for modification. Laser-etched business cards anyone?

[via iPhone Atlas]

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San Francisco's KPIX/Channel 5's "Eye on the Bay" program did a decent, lengthy, and enthusiastic piece about this year's Maker Faire Bay Area. The piece covers everything from the R/C warships to Russell the robotic giraffe and "Hand of Man" to the steampunk offerings to art cars, the Coke and Mentos show, and the bicycle-powered stage. Definitely a nice, satisfying slice of what Maker Faire has to offer (though they don't mention anything about this year's ReMake America theme, all of the amazing food makers we had, or any of the crafts). Several times during the piece, the reporter insists you have to plan to go next year. He's right!

Maker Faire - 9/17/09

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Last month, we noted that a group of mostly Japanese porn publishers tried to bring charges against 10,000 people under South Korea's harsh new copyright laws, claiming that they were guilty of uploading copyrighted material. More recently, those same publishers announced plans to increase the number sued to nearly 65,000. Well, that plan may not be getting very far as Michael Scott alerts us to the news that South Korean prosecutors have rejected the charges against those 10,000 uploaders, instead saying they would just charge 10 "habitual offenders," though those offenders may face jail time.

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In an effort to test the new boundaries afforded by my Make: Halloween Contest 2009 beat, I bring you this bulemic zombie prop robot that pukes on command into a toxic waste drum thoughtfully labeled "inedible." A steal at only $2750 apiece, they are sadly and incomprehensibly discontinued. I was planning to order a matching set of five for the baby's room, too. Seriously, though, someone should remake this. It's handy all year long!

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Just Posted: Our preview sample gallery of shots taken with the Fujifilm FinePix F70EXR, current holder of the 'world's smallest 10x zoom camera' and the first model to sport the new 10 megapixel version of the new Super CCD EXR sensor. We've had an F70 EXR for a few days now and managed to find a break in the clouds long enough to produce a quick gallery of images taken in a wide variety of lighting conditions, using all three EXR modes.

Looking to increase his atmospheric lighting options, maker Jeroen Domburg built this wirelessly controlled RGB LED light bulb using an ATTiny44, RGB LED emitter, USB-PSU, and 433MHz RF receiver. The whole thing managed to fit inside a standard CFL housing and cost slightly less than a retail version.

[via hackaday]

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A judge in Brazil has apparently told a website that offers downloads of a P2P file sharing app that because it has ads on the site, its operators can be found guilty of criminal copyright infringement and may face jailtime. Specifically, the entertainment industry had sued a particular website because it distributed a piece of file sharing software called K-Lite Nitro, even though it does not make or control the software. After first demanding that the software filter out a huge list of content, which was impossible since the website operators had nothing to do with the software, the company behind the website is now being told by the court that just offering up the software is infringing. So... first there was contributory infringement for file sharing apps themselves... and now they're going after sites that distribute such software? What is that? Contributory contributory copyright infringement? The site plans to appeal, noting that there are plenty of legal uses of the software as well. They also might want to point out that some forms of Brazilian music has done quite well by embracing file sharing to their advantage... But, for some reason, no one ever seems to want to look at that side of the equation.

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Have you ever wanted more I/O pins on your Arduino? Well if you have, check out this write up about using an i2c I/O Expander with an Arduino.

In the Maker Shed:


Make: Arduino

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A ReadWriteWeb piece up on the NY Times site explores the recent glitch during the move of a number of colleges onto Google's email service that allowed a number of students to see each others' inboxes for a period of more than three days. Google would not give exact numbers, but the article concludes that about 10 schools were affected. "While the glitch itself was minor and was fixed in a few days, the real concern — at least at Brown — was with how Google handled the situation. Without communicating to the internal IT department, Google shut down the affected accounts, a decision which led to a heated conversation between school officials and the Google account representative. In the end, only 22 out of the 200 students were affected, but the fix was not put into place until Tuesday. ... The students had access to each other's email accounts for three solid days... before the accounts were suspended by Google. Oddly enough, this situation seems to be acceptable [to Brown's IT manager, who] 'praised Google for its prompt response.' (We don't know about you, but if someone else could read our email for three days, we wouldn't exactly call that 'prompt.')"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

When you get something going all of a sudden the parasites opportunists swoop in and want to take control. Funny how they leave you alone when you're not so hot.

I suppose I should see it as a good sign, but they all resort to the same kind of character attacks when I decline their offers. Some nastier than others. The offers amount to me working my ass off to make them rich, for which, in turn -- I get nothing. $0. Bupkis.

Only in the tech industry do people have the audacity to look you in the eye and say You Work For Free To Make Me Rich. YWFFTMMR.

The stupid thing about it is that's at least part of the reason I'm trying to get out of Twitter. I don't like their economic proposition but I do like microblogging. I figure if I'm not going to make any money off my work, then I'll work in an environment where no one does. It's weird that the people behind Twitter are supposedly capitalists yet seem to not understand that very simple idea. People don't work for free. They don't pour out their passion in the cause of making you wealthy. They might be motivated to do it if they saw some upside.

I'll let you know when someone approaches this space with respect and an offer that isn't usurous.

In "What If Star Wars Was Made By Environmentalists?" the movie is reimagined as "Star Non-Violent Resistance" and eco-tourism is used to establish independence from the empire; Vader is forced to file environmental impact statements on planetary destruction, etc. Funny!

What If Star Wars Was Made By Environmentalists?

Kristian Hammerstad's gallery of haunted and monster art has me shivering with delight.

Kristian Hammerstad (via Street Anatomy)

Etsy seller TheBlackSpotBooks sells a library in necklace form -- a collection of 11 miniature blank-books bound in scrap and antique leather. I love the idea, though I'd love it more if the books had tiny little printing, the text of great public domain works.

Library of antique and scrap leather books for the neck - eleven miniature books (via Neatorama)

In Paul Graham's provocative "Post-Medium Publishing," he argues that we've rarely paid for "content," but rather for "form" -- that's why a good hardcover costs the same as a bad one, and both are more expensive than paperbacks. As the newspaper and CD forms lose currency, their publishers argue that what we've been buying all along is the "content" and demand that we "continue" to pay for it online.

What about iTunes? Doesn't that show people will pay for content? Well, not really. iTunes is more of a tollbooth than a store. Apple controls the default path onto the iPod. They offer a convenient list of songs, and whenever you choose one they ding your credit card for a small amount, just below the threshold of attention. Basically, iTunes makes money by taxing people, not selling them stuff. You can only do that if you own the channel, and even then you don't make much from it, because a toll has to be ignorable to work. Once a toll becomes painful, people start to find ways around it, and that's pretty easy with digital content.

I think he goes off the rails in the next graf, where he talks about how writers can self-publish merely by uploading files; this commits the same error that he's upset about: confusing "publishing" and "printing."

I also wonder if St McLuhan might not object here, with something about the form being the content.

Post-Medium Publishing (via /.)

Dan Jones writes "2009 marks 60 years since the advent of modern cryptography. It was back in October 1949 when mathematician Claude Shannon published a paper on Communication Theory of Secrecy Systems. According to his employer at the time, Bell Labs, the work transformed cryptography from an art to a science and is generally considered the foundation of modern cryptography. Since then significant developments in secure communications have continued, particularly with the advent of the Internet and Web. CIO has a pictorial representation of the past six decades of research and development in encryption technology. Highlights include the design of the first quantum cryptography protocol by Charles Bennett and Gilles Brassard in 1984, and the EFF's 'Deep Crack' DES code breaker of 1998."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Wonderful bat gallery and how the photos are taken!

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This is worth a special post as a followup to the earlier piece, it's so interesting.

I was talking with a friend today, he's an expert in DNS, and I said it's too bad people can't open their supercloud.org sub-domain in a browser. I understood why this wasn't possible:

1. The browser is looking for an A record or a CNAME, and we're setting the TXT record.

My friend who doesn't want me to say his name (and I respect that) said it might not have to be that way. We talked about connecting the DNS with HTTP and it was really intriguing. If you think about it, DNS is like the lizard brain of the Internet, and HTTP, while it is in some ways lower tech than DNS, is the cerebral cortex. To have them integrate is like bringing the Wright Brothers plane they flew at Kitty Hawk on an Apollo moon mission. But that's the way we do things in techland.

Then I thought -- wait a minute, what's to stop me from also registering an A record that points back to me, and then keeping a database locally that associates a name with an RSS URL. Then when you open your supercloud.org subdomain in a browser:

1. It comes to my machine.

2. It looks you up in the database I'm keeping that's a mirror of what's in the TXT records in DNS.

3. From there I get your RSS address.

4. To which I simply do a 302 redirect.

Hah! I had to try it. And guess what! The fcuker works!!

Try it out: http://davewiner.supercloud.org/.

And then go through the registration process, and try it out yourself.

This is actually important because everyone expected taht you'd be able to open the supercloud.org sub-domain in the browser. Now you can.

I am pleased to announce that I have been nominated to receive this year's Most Ridiculous David Mamet Allusion award. Also: I dig the no-BS approach of this traditional weighted gate closer from Snug Cottage Hardware. No springs, no strings, no pulleys. A pretty easy remake, too, if you can find a cannonball.

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antdude sends along an AP piece on the decline of the teaching of cursive writing in schools — ramifications of which we've discussed a few times before. "The decline of cursive is happening as students are doing more and more work on computers, including writing. In 2011, the writing test of the National Assessment of Educational Progress will require 8th and 11th graders to compose on computers, with 4th graders following in 2019. ... Handwriting is increasingly something people do only when they need to make a note to themselves rather than communicate with others, [an educator] said. Students accustomed to using computers to write at home have a hard time seeing the relevance of hours of practicing cursive handwriting. 'I am not sure students have a sense of any reason why they should vest their time and effort in writing a message out manually when it can be sent electronically in seconds.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

eldavojohn notes a paper released in Nature Neuroscience today describing work in which paraplegic rats were enabled to walk again as early as a week after injury and treatment. The process involves a serotonin-influencing drug and electrical stimulation of the spine, along with an incentive to the paralyzed back legs to move — namely, being placed a treadmill. Soon a poorly understood spinal mechanism called the "central pattern generator" kicks in and the rats' legs move under the stimulus of a rhythmic signal from the spine (the brain is not involved). Eurekalert reports, "Daily treadmill training over several weeks eventually enabled the rats to regain full weight-bearing walking, including backwards, sideways and at running speed. However, the injury still interrupted the brain's connection to the spinal cord-based rhythmic walking circuitry, leaving the rats unable to walk of their own accord."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.