coondoggie writes "The folks at the Government Accountability Office have not been all that kind to NASA in recent years, and today they issued another damning report on the future of the manned space flight program. NASA is still struggling to develop a solid business case — including firm requirements, mature technologies, a knowledge-based acquisition strategy, a realistic cost estimate, and sufficient funding and time — needed to justify moving the Constellation program, which includes the two main spaceflight components, the Ares I Crew Launch Vehicle and the Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle, forward into the implementation phase, the GAO stated."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

We've covered how it's a dumb idea for companies to sue so-called "sucks sites," (sites that complain about a company). First, plaintiffs in such lawsuits almost never win. The trademark claims almost always fail. No one is confusing the sucks site with the company they complain about. Second, just bringing such a lawsuit tends to call significantly more attention to the complaints against the company (the ever popular "Streisand Effect"). And yet... they still keep on coming. The latest one has a bit of a twist, though. Rather than suing the owner of a website, the organization is suing the guy who set up a complaint group on Facebook. Other than that, though, the scenarios are basically the same. In this case, a beauty school student set up a Facebook group to complain about things happening at the school, and the school sued for both the use of the logo (trademark infringement) and on claims that many of the posts to the group were defamatory.

The trademark claim hopefully gets tossed aside quickly. No one's going to confuse the group for being a part of the school, and it's difficult to see how they'll make a claim that the use was "in commerce." The defamation claim really depends on what was said... but if it was said by other students, then it's difficult to see how the student who started the group can be held liable for them. Besides, some courts at least have noted that online forums are the equivalent of a bunch of friends talking over drinks, and the speech should naturally be taken less seriously. One hopes that the judge in this case recognizes the nature of basic online conversations as well.

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An anonymous reader writes "In autumn last year, Google announced Project 10 to the 100, through which it aimed to commit $10 million to implement the best philanthropic idea. The project was suspended indefinitely after receiving more than 150,000 submissions. Google has now announced sixteen finalists — each of which was inspired by many individual submissions — and issued a call for votes. The voting deadline is October 8 and the Project 10^100 advisory board will then select up to five ideas to be implemented."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I like the looks of these custom BBQ appliances by Steve Stealey of BARRELSMOKERS.net. [via Neatorama]

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It looks like the folks over at Cash4Gold have finally realized that it wasn't a particularly smart move to sue Consumerist for reporting on various allegations made against Cash4Gold. The company has dropped that part of the lawsuit, though it continues to sue the ex-employees it accuses of both defamation and "publishing any more confidential, proprietary information" (and, note, they don't say which info was defamatory or which was confidential and proprietary). Consumerist makes it very clear that this wasn't a settlement. They didn't ask to be dropped from the case or agree to anything. One would guess that somewhere down the line a lawyer explained to Cash4Gold that its likelihood of winning such a case was about as close to zero as you could imagine...

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Ars Technica has a great look at the latest installment in the Ratchet and Clank series, "A Crack in Time." Along with the great looking graphics and same great gameplay, A Crack in Time offers a brand new game mechanic, "time pads." Time pads allow you to make a copy of yourself and move through a series of action, then shift back to "real time" and interact with your past self. "It's a game mechanic that's hard to describe in words, and wrapping your head around it inside the game isn't much easier when it's first described with an example or two. You have to play with it and bend time to your will before you see just how ingenious the whole thing is. The puzzles begin simply and grow harder as the game moves on. The use of time is done very well and elevates what we've played of the game from another platforming experience to something truly special."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Stephan Martin writes in to tell us about his homemade thermal imaging system, the Thermoscanner. He mounted a TPA81 thermopile array onto an XY servo mount, then hooked it up to his computer using an Arduino microcontroller. A Processing program is then used to collect data from the sensor and display it in an image.

The resolution is pretty coarse, but it is pretty sweet to be able to make thermal images for around $150!

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By now you should know that one of the entertainment industry's favorite tools for forcing ever more draconian copyright laws around the world is to use international treaties. Such treaties are not put together by elected officials, but appointed diplomats, often with tremendous input (to the point of allowing them to write the details) from industries that are protected. Then, once those treaties are in place, copyright maximalists just get to sit back and say "but we must make our copyright laws stronger if we ever expect to live up to our international obligations..." The latest such attempt is the infamous ACTA bill, which the entertainment industry has had a heavy hand in crafting -- but the public is told that the treaty negotiations are matters of national security and cannot be revealed. Uh huh.

Apparently, in a recent "Working Group" on intellectual property issues in Washington DC, one area of "concern" is Canadian copyright law -- because Canada appears to be one country where (thank you Michael Geist!) the public has been galvanized to speak up and explain that copyight law is a deal between the public and content creators, and the public shouldn't be ignored in the process. But, no worries. Apparently, one lobbyist said that perhaps the best way to deal with those rebellious Canadians thinking for themselves is just to use ACTA to force Canada to implement its own DMCA-like law, something that Canada has (thankfully) rejected in the past few years. So here we go again...

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Bassam Tariq is a Boing Boing guestblogger who is the co-author of 30 Mosques. A blog that celebrated the New York City mosques during the Islamic month of Ramadan. He lives in Harlem, New York.

 

They gave me the creeps when I was a kid, but damn did their cereals taste good. Not sure if anyone has noticed, but there has been a sudden reemergence of all things Monster Cereal and this site is documenting every step of it. Who would've thought there was such a large cult following for Count Chocula and company?

Who's your favorite of the bunch? Count Chocula may have swag, but Boo Berry's sedated brows kill.

See all the collectibles showcased: http://monstercereal.blogspot.com

sonnejw0 writes "NewScientist is reporting a link between sleep deprivation and Alzheimer's Disease via an increased amyloid-beta plaque load thought responsible for a large part of the symptoms of the disease, in mice. Medication to abrogate insomnia reduced the plaque load. Also discussed is a recently discovered sleep cycle of amyloid-beta deposition in the brain, in which levels decrease while asleep. 'Holtzman also tried sending the mice to sleep with a drug that is being trialled for insomnia, called Almorexant. This reduced the amount of plaque-forming protein. He suggests that sleeping for longer could limit the formation of plaques, and perhaps block it altogether.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Never happen! But it's neat looking, and it uses some impressive sounding industrial process called "impact extrusion," and its proving to be a pretty effective advertisements for its designer Dzmitry Samal. [via Gizmodo]

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It's really funny to watch the entertainment industry lobbyists use a popular trick among disingenuous debaters: it tries to flip the arguments being used towards themselves against their opponents. For example, we've seen copyright maximalists argue against those of us who question the need for gov't intervention in issues like copyright claim that copyright represents a true free market, and weakening copyright law is somehow unfair gov't meddling in the free market. The latest trick is particularly neat. Plenty of people argue that all of the attempted changes that the entertainment industry has been pushing for around the world are unnecessary attempts by this industry to prop up an obsolete business model. Would you believe that the entertainment industry is now using the same language in favor of its proposals?

Indeed. As lots of people are pushing back on dangerous plans to "kick people off the internet," ISPs have pointed out how costly such a three strikes policy would be for ISPs who are suddenly drafted to be copyright police. In response, the head of BPI, the major UK music lobbyist group, responded by charging that ISPs were relying on an obsolete business model. Seriously:

"BT is clinging on to an old business model which is supported by illegal downloading. That's not only unfair to artists and creators, but penalises BT's many customers who use the internet legally,"

This implies -- incorrectly -- that file sharing is somehow a massive boon to ISPs. The very same ISPs who keep claiming they need to use traffic shaping to prevent any network from being overloaded by file sharing. It's pretty ridiculous to claim that ISPs are relying on file sharing as any sort of business model at all. A huge percentage of people have internet access, not because of file sharing, but because these days it's hard to get through life without an internet connection. Suggesting that they make their money because of file sharing is patently ridiculous. It's the sort of thing that a reporter should push back on, when an industry rep spews such nonsense.

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eldavojohn writes "Crispy Gamer is running a very interesting article on why games cost $60. Many games start out at this retail price — but why? Did the makers of The Beatles Rock Band game just happen upon $59.99, as did the makers of Batman Arkham Asylum? After all, those two titles surely took different amounts of man hours to develop, and result in different averages of entertainment time enjoyed by the consumer. They interview a director at Electronic Entertainment Design and Research, who breaks down the pie as $12 to retailer, $5 to discounts/returns/retail marketing, $10 toward manufacturing costs and shipping. That leaves $30 to $35 in the hands of the publishers. Though lengthy, the article looks at three forces of economics on why game publishers continuously end up in lockstep for pricing: sensible greed, consumer stupidity or evil conspiracy. When asked about the next step up to $70 or $80, Hal Halpin (president and founder of the Entertainment Consumers Association) says, 'I'm not sure that we'll see a standard $70 price point at all. To my mind, emerging technologies, subscriptions and episodic and downloadable content should all enable price drops — increasing accessibility to a much wider audience.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

French artist and naturalist Hubert Duprat used the hermit crab shell switcheroo technique to make these precious and semi-precious materials available to a group of caddis fly larvae. The larvae used the materials to construct protective casings for themselves. Hubert Duprat interview [via Teagan Tall]

More:

Hermit crabs in glass

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Well, here's a fun one. Apparently someone has created a space invaders type video game... where every "alien" is randomly associated with a file (any file) on your hard drive. If you kill the alien... or the alien kills you, the game will delete that particular file. It's like playing Russian Roulette with a fully loaded gun. I imagine no one is stupid enough to actually play... though I'm a bit disappointed that they didn't make a version where killing the aliens at least saves some files. That way, at least, you'd have more incentive to play well...

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A new article in Smithsonian posits that Jackson Pollock hid his full name in the abstractions of his famed piece Mural. The article's author, art historian Henry Adams, says that his wife, also an art scholar, was the first to notice the letters. From Smithsonian:

I was researching a book about Pollock's lifelong relationship with his mentor, Thomas Hart Benton, the famed regionalist and muralist, when I sat puzzling over a reproduction of Mural after breakfast one morning with Marianne, herself an art historian. She suddenly said she could make out the letters S-O-N in blackish paint in the upper right area of the mural. Then she realized JACKSON ran across the entire top. And finally she saw POLLOCK below that.

The characters are unorthodox, even ambiguous, and largely hidden. But, she pointed out, it could hardly be random coincidence to find just those letters in that sequence...

Pollock's possibly writing his name in Mural testifies to an overlooked feature of his works: they have a structure, contrary to the popular notion that they could be done by any 5-year-old with a knack for splatters. In my view, Pollock organized the painting around his name according to a compositional system—vertical markings that serve as the loci of rhythmic spirals—borrowed directly from his mentor, Benton.

"Decoding Jackson Pollock"

Barence writes "Microsoft boss Steve Ballmer has blasted the company's own mobile operating system at the firm's Venture Capital Summit. One tweet from an attendee claims Ballmer said the company had 'screwed up with Windows Mobile. Wishes they had already launched WM7. They completely revamped the team.' Another claims Ballmer said 'we've pumped in some new talent. This will not happen again.' It's not the first time Ballmer has attacked Windows Mobile, having publicly stated that version 6.5 was "not the full release we wanted"."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This conceptual sensory augmentation device is one of the creepier ones I've seen, I think because it seems to have a mind of it's own. The Miruko wearable eyeball attaches to your body, and continually scans for monsters that only it can see. Once it finds one, you can follow it's gaze to figure out where it is looking. To capture the moment, you pull out your trusty iPhone, which is running an augmented reality program, to finally see the virtual target. For now, it appears to be only looking for monsters, but I'm not sure I would trust it to do that for long. After all, it appears to be a monster itself, and why should it be loyal to us humans? If it starts leading people down dark tunnels, don't say I didn't warn you.

There aren't any build instructions, but do you really want to unleash this kind of thing on the world? Ok, I agree. Anyone know how to build a monster detection sensor?

[via pink tentacle]

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Via Family Holloway, I came across a short opinion piece by Brian Edwards bitching about how libraries are facilitating book theft. At first, I honestly thought it was a joke or a parody, to make fun of those who complain about online "piracy," but I actually think he's serious. I'd never heard of Edwards, but apparently he's a big media personality and author in New Zealand. And, boy, does he hate the fact that libraries don't pay him every time someone checks out a book:

What pisses me off as an author is that for every person who buys your book, dozens of other bludgers get to read it for nothing. Let me give you an example. A few years back I wrote a biography of Helen Clark. It took about six months to write and during that time I had effectively no other income. The book retailed at $45. On the standard author's royalty of 10%, I got $4.50 for every copy sold. Helen, Portrait of a Prime Minister sold 9,000 copies, a reasonable if not spectacular figure in the New Zealand market. So I got $40,500 before tax for my six month's work.

I'm not complaining about that either. But...

Every public library in New Zealand bought at least one copy of Helen. And they lent each of those copies to other people to read for... nothing. Last year there were still 227.4 copies of the book in New Zealand public libraries. If each of those copies was taken out by one person a month, that's 2,729 people who read but didn't pay for my book -- my six month's work. At $4.50 per unsold copy, that's a theoretical loss of income to me in one year of $12,280.

While he later admits that not all of those people (and he made up the numbers anyway...) would have bought the book, but them immediately follows that statement up with this doozy:

But there's a principle here: when one person buys a book and lends it to another person to read, they effectively become an accessory to theft. Their generous act amounts to little more than stealing the author's work. When a public library buys a book and lends it to thousands of other people to read, it's grand theft copyright and really no different from illegally downloading music or movies or copying CDs or DVDs on your computer.

For someone who positions himself as an expert, he seems to have almost no understanding of the purpose of copyright law or of the public library systems. In the end, he says that libraries should pay him 1/4 of the usual book sale royalty per loan of his book. So, in his case, $1.13 every time the book is loaned out. Apparently, he doesn't quite realize that he's basically asking the public libraries, funded by public tax dollars, to subsidize him. The original Holloway link above does a nice job schooling Edwards, and then discusses things in more detail with Edwards in the comments -- though Edwards seems unwilling to budge on his claims of libraries being theives, or to understand basic common sense. Someone points out to him that if he bought a chainsaw, it would be ridiculous to stop him from lending it to someone, and his response is: "There is no intellectual property in a chainsaw."

Edwards also seems fully enamored with the myth that copyright law is based on some sort of "labor theory" -- that the more time you put in, somehow the more money you deserve to get out. While I'm unfamiliar with New Zealand copyright law, in the US, such theories have been widely discredited in the courts repeatedly. And, of course, they make no sense when viewed alongside the actual purpose of copyright law. Edwards seems to believe that copyright is welfare for creators, rather than an incentive to create.

In the meantime, perhaps the public libraries of New Zealand can do Mr. Edwards a favor next time he publishes a book: don't buy it. Ditto for anyone who might think of lending it... er... I mean, being an accessory to a crime in distributing copyrighted materials.

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jenningsthecat writes "With the recent CRTC decision giving Canadian telcos such as Bell and Telus the legal right to deny third-party ISPs access to their infrastructure, smaller Canadian Internet providers are again fighting for their lives, and are asking their customers for help. The ISPs are seeking public support, asking people to go to competitivebroadband.com to send either a form letter or a personalized message to the Industry Minister, the Prime Minister, the Opposition Leader, and optionally the respondent's local Minister of Parliament. If the CRTC's decision is not overturned, approximately 30 ISPs will likely be forced out of business. Competition in the ADSL market will be totally eliminated, and Canadians will have only two choices for wired Internet access: the local Cableco or the local Telco. Given that Canadian taxpayers have heavily subsidized the telcos in multiple ways for several decades, this decision to hand over exclusive control of the keys to the cookie jar hardly seems fair."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

jenningsthecat writes "With the recent CRTC decision giving Canadian telcos such as Bell and Telus the legal right to deny third-party ISPs access to their infrastructure, smaller Canadian Internet providers are again fighting for their lives, and are asking their customers for help. The ISPs are seeking public support, asking people to go to competitivebroadband.com to send either a form letter or a personalized message to the Industry Minister, the Prime Minister, the Opposition Leader, and optionally the respondent's local Minister of Parliament. If the CRTC's decision is not overturned, approximately 30 ISPs will likely be forced out of business. Competition in the ADSL market will be totally eliminated, and Canadians will have only two choices for wired Internet access: the local Cableco or the local Telco. Given that Canadian taxpayers have heavily subsidized the telcos in multiple ways for several decades, this decision to hand over exclusive control of the keys to the cookie jar hardly seems fair."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I'm expecting a lot of prawn-armed Wikuses (Wiki?) this year, but the award goes to YouTuber GrafixFan for producing the first bloggable District-9-related Halloween costume images I've seen. We must harvest his tissues immediately.

Make: Halloween Contest 2009

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 you could be chosen as a winner.

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By now, plenty of people have understood the details of how Trent Reznor embraced new business models and has thrived online by doing so. But could he do the same thing in an entirely different industry as well? A few folks have sent in an interview with Reznor and long-time collaborator Rob Sheridan on Joystiq, discussing how they wanted to create a video game. While Reznor admits that he hasn't done enough research to fully understand the video game ecosystem, something did strike him in his first few meetings:

And as first time people in a pitch meeting, it was kind of depressing. Depressing to see that the people in control of those studios and publishers are much the same as the people sitting at record companies.

In a record company, they aren't musicians or people who love music, they're people who want to sell plastic discs. They think they have a formula where if they can eliminate the artist from that equation, even better. You see that in the case of the Pussycat Dolls and some of the other fabricated crap that's out there. What we tended to notice in the video game meetings was that it didn't seem that there were gamers there. It's business guys who want to turn the company into a profit making machine. They look at it in terms of numbers, like a Hollywood studio. If it costs "X" amount to make a game, to compete, then it has to be a proven franchise or it has to be similar enough to something they know is going to sell. They don't want to take the risk.

It certainly sounds like they're still just tossing around ideas -- not heavily committed to making a video game (so don't start rumors!) -- but they do appear interested in experimenting with a variety of different concepts once Reznor is finally done touring. It would be neat to see if Reznor can take his success and experiences with the music industry, and translate it to video games. There have been some companies that have started to figure this out, such as Stardock, who takes a very pro-gamer stance that focuses on providing more value, rather than trying to stop people from doing bad stuff. And not surprisingly, Stardock has seen quite a lot of success in doing so. In the meantime, for you Reznor fans, apparently the trick to getting him to hang out with you is to have an old time arcade set up with Robotron.

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Several readers sent in word that Google has served a Cease and Desist order to Cyanogen, one of the most prolific Android modders: his CyanogenMod is enjoyed by 30,000 users. The move is puzzling. Gizmodo wonders what Google's game is, and Lauren Weinstein calls the move "not of the high Googley' caliber" that one would expect of the company.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Bassam Tariq is a Boing Boing guestblogger who is the co-author of 30 Mosques. A blog that celebrated the New York City mosques during the Islamic month of Ramadan. He lives in Harlem, New York.


If you live in New York City or any other major city, you may have seen a store sign scream "Halal Meat" or "Halal Certified." These signs are nothing but comfort for many Muslims who want meat that's prepared in accordance to the Islamic guidelines. The whole halal-making process is very similar to the kosher-making one. In fact, many Muslims, including myself, limit their meat consumption to only kosher and halal meat since they both fall under a similar rigorous certification.

So when I get tired of tuna sandwiches and want to get my halal grub on, where do I go? Zabihah.com - it's really the authoritative guide to halal dining. It's a wiki-site created by the brilliant Shahed Amanullah back in 1999. Shahed meticulously typed in 200 restaurants himself, and now the site bolsters around 6,000 halal restaurants worldwide. Anyone can add their own restaurant and leave a review or two.

Anyone like to recommend their favorite halal eatery? Please do share!

Visit the site: www.zabihah.com

I'm curious what kind of sensor they're using to make this breath-monitoring dress with dimming/brightening LEDs under the top layer of fabric.

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TechDirt is running the piece on Corona, CA, where officials are considering ignoring a California law that authorizes red-light cameras — cutting the state and the county out of their poition of the take — in order to increase the city's revenue. The story was first reported a week ago. The majority of tickets are being (automatically) issued for "California stops" before a right turn on red, which studies have shown rarely contribute to an accident. TechDirt notes the apparent unconstitutionality of what Corona proposes to do: "The problem here is that Corona is shredding the Sixth Amendment of the US Constitution, the right to a trial by jury. By reclassifying a moving violation... to an administrative violation... Corona is doing something really nefarious. In order to appeal an administrative citation you have to admit guilt, pay the full fine, and then apply for a hearing in front of an administrative official, not a judge in a court. The city could simply deny all hearings for administrative violations or schedule them far out in advance knowing full well that they have your money, which you had to pay before you could appeal."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I have to admit that I cannot remember where (perhaps it was in the comments on Techdirt?), but I recently saw a discussion among a few people discussing how odd it is that computers and mobile phones have advanced so much... but scientific calculators still are nearly identical as to what they were decades ago. The state of the art seems to have frozen somewhere in the 1980s. Perhaps it's because Texas Instruments, one of the major calulator makers out there, goes around threatening people who hack their calculators to run additional software on them. Apparently, the company is sending DMCA takedown notices to people who have posted code for running other software on their TI calculators. This is clearly against what the DMCA was designed to do, but is a consequence of the overly broad (and, frankly, ridiculous) anti-circumvention clause found in the DMCA.

This is a perfect example of how the DMCA is used by companies to prevent innovation, not to stop copying. Notice that there is no "copying" of any TI software going on here. It's just that in being able to run this software, apparently you need to bypass some protection measures that TI installed. Thus, TI claims, it's a circumvention and a violation of the DMCA. Of course, as the article (and various experts) note in the article, both the Copyright Office and the courts have often looked down on such blatant misuses of the DMCA, but for now the legal threats worked. The people contacted have removed the code.

Frankly, I can't fathom how this makes any sense at all for TI. Making its calculators more useful and interesting should only increase demand for the calculators. TI makes its money selling the physical product, not the software on the calculators. So what possible business rationale is there for stopping such hacking? It seems only sure to decrease the market, not increase it.

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Here's a simple helping hand upgrade that makes soldering wires to potentiometers and switches tons easier. Just replace one of the alligator clips with a squeeze style "wide mouth" clip. Here's one from mouser.com that will work.

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theodp writes "Joel Spolsky sings the praises of The Duct Tape Programmer, who delivers programming teams from the evil of 'architecture astronauts' who might otherwise derail a project with their faddish programming craziness. The say-no-to-over-engineering attitude of the Duct Tape Programmer stems not from orneriness, but from the realization that even a 50%-good solution that people actually have solves more problems and survives longer than a 99% solution that nobody has because it's in your lab where you're endlessly polishing the damn thing. Like Steve Jobs, Duct Tape Programmers firmly believe that Real Artists Ship."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Solheim Rapid Prototyping lab at the University of Washington was in the news last March for developing a new 3D printing process that uses ceramic powder as an inexpensive alternative to the pricier substrates that are currently the de facto standard for powder-bed processes. Well they've done it again, this time with glass powder, which is formed into an object by layerwise application of a liquid binder. When the part is complete, it can be sintered in a kiln to produce a continuous glass object. The official UW online press release includes a telling quote from lab co-director Mark Ganter: "It became clear that if we could get a material into powder form at about 20 microns we could print just about anything."

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ancientribe sends in a DarkReading piece on the expanding footprint of small, targeted botnets in enterprises. "Bot infections are on the rise in businesses, and most come from botnets you've never heard of nor ever will. Botnet researchers at Damballa have found that nearly 60 percent of bot infections in organizations are from bot armies with only a handful to a few hundred bots built to target a particular organization. Only 5 percent of the bot infections were from big-name botnets, such as Zeus/ZDbot and Koobface. And more businesses are getting hit: 7 to 9 percent of an organization's machines are bot-infected, up from 5-to-7 percent last year, according to Damballa. ... [Damballa's] Ollmann says many of the smaller botnets appear to have more knowledge of the targeted organization as well. 'They are very strongly associated with a lot of insider knowledge...and we see a lot of hands-on command and control with these small botnets,' he says. ... Ollmann says botnets of all sizes are also increasingly using more and different types of malware rather than one particular family in order to evade detection. 'Most botnets, even small ones, have hundreds of different pieces of malware and families in use..."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

While we sometimes get annoyed at US courts for revealing anonymous commenters, the truth is that courts in the US seem to be much better than just about anywhere else in the world at respecting a right for anonymous comments. Case in point: a bunch of folks have been sending in versions of a story happening up in Canada, where the publicly funded York University got a court to force Google to reveal the names of faculty members who were criticizing the university anonymously via email. Amazingly, the court agreed and ordered the info revealed. Even more ridiculous is what the "complaint" was about. The University had announced the hiring of a new dean and exaggerated that dean's accomplishments. As many of the articles on this story are noting, what better way to create a chilling effect than to try to out anonymous critics. The university claims that this went "beyond free speech" and even though the complaints were supported by the very guy who was hired, the university still insists it was "damaging." I would think that outing your own professors is a lot more damaging than some squabble about over-inflating a new dean's resume.

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

Canadian literature (or CanLit, as some insist) has gradually become a genre of its own- one of books that are bleak, desperate, *meaningful*, and above all, dull.

New DIY publisher The Workhorsery aims to do something about that by releasing You and The Pirates, Jocelyne Allens' superfun debut novel.

The book dares to star you (a snarky prairie-girl expat) in its second-person wackjob tale of terrorists, cats and pirates in modern-day Tokyo. Check it out!

Free chapter (PDF)

Amazon page (link)

There's something pleasing about finding your last Tic Tacs wedged inside the dispenser and freeing them. The creator of this "Collecting Stuck Tic Tacs" gallery seems to agree. (Thanks, Dean Putney!)

Ben Marks and the crew at The Collectors Weekly, immersed themselves in an Antiques Roadshow taping last month in San Jose, California, and documented their experience. Ben brought a Pogo animation cel for appraisal and his colleague Jessica Lewis had a Elks Club fob from the early part of last century. From Collectors Weekly:

Inside the set, the energy is exhilarating. The appraisers are laughing, fiercely examining items, calling out to one another: “Hey, you gotta take a look at this!” The excitement is contagious and we quickly become wrapped up in the psychology of television, people with dreams, and family secrets being revealed.

(KQED volunteer Lyn) Johnson leads us to Jewelry to see what we can learn about the Elks piece. As we wait, an appraiser named Barry Weber is talking to a colleague about a guest’s item. The conversation is mostly about what the guest may already know about the item, and whether they should pitch it to go on camera.

At the Jewelry table, Adam Patrick of A La Vielle Russie, Inc. examines an Elks fob from the early 20th century. The piece is made of 14k yellow gold, includes a diamond and a sapphire, and holds an elk's tooth. It was appraised at $750 to $800.

As Bemko told us the day before, the show’s dual goals include informing a guest about his or her item, as well as documenting the guest during what she called a “vulnerable” moment. If the guest knows too much, it doesn’t make for great TV. Weber knows this, and they want to be sure not to waste anyone’s time with a pitch that might get shot down.

"An Inside Look at Antiques Roadshow: A Collectors Weekly Special Report"

Organize your kitchen utensils and gadgets with this custom made plexiglass drawer organizer.
Thanks go to Conrad Hopkins for the original article in MAKE, Volume 19.
To download The DIY Drawer Organizer video click here and subscribe in iTunes.
Check out the complete DIY Drawer Organizer article in MAKE, Volume 19
and you can see that in our Digital Edition.

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Organize your kitchen utensils and gadgets with this custom made plexiglass drawer organizer.
Thanks go to Conrad Hopkins for the original article in MAKE, Volume 19.
View the PDF of this project. and then subscribe to MAKE Magazine for other great projects
you can do over the weekend.

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Cyborg insects, hybrids of insects and machines, have been under development in military R&D for a few years now (no, seriously). Now, electrical engineers at the University of California, Berkeley have developed an implantable radio-controlled neural stimulating device that allows them to control, with a fair degree of accuracy, the flight of an insect, in this case, a beetle. Says the article on the Neurophilosophy blog:

Electrically-controllable insects have obvious military applications. They could be used as micro air vehicles for reconnaissance missions, or as couriers which deliver small packages to locations that are not easily accessible to humans or terrestrial robots. The beetles used here (Mecynorrhina torquata) are among the largest of all insect species, and are capable of carrying additional loads of up to 30% of their 8g body weight. But they could also be very useful to researchers who study insect mating behavior, the foraging behavior of insect predators, and flight dynamics and energetics.

I don't know about you, but I find this extraordinarily creepy.

Flight of the remote-controlled cyborg beetle

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bughunter passes on a report from Wired Threat Level about the effort by Democratic lawmakers to roll back some provisions of the Patriot Act. Three of its provisions expire at the end of this year, and the reform attempt is expected to be attached to legislation to renew them. "Lawmakers are considering key changes to the Patriot Act and other spy laws — proposals that could give new life to lawsuits accusing the nation's telecommunications companies of turning over Americans' electronic communications to the government without warrants. On Oct. 1, the Senate Judiciary Committee likely will consider revoking that immunity legislation as it works to revise the Patriot Act and other spy laws with radical changes that provide for more government transparency and more privacy protections." Among the other likely goals of reform efforts, according to Wired, are limiting the government's power to issue "national security letters," and limiting "black bag" searches to cases of spying or terrorism — 65% of past searches were authorized in drug cases.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

suraj.sun excerpts from a tantalizing Engadget post: "Phoenix is showing off a few interesting things at IDF, but the real standout is their new Instant Boot BIOS [video here], a highly optimized UEFI implementation that can start loading an OS in just under a second. Combined with Windows 7's optimized startup procedure, that means you're looking at incredibly short boot times — we saw a retrofitted Dell Adamo hit the Windows desktop in 20 seconds, while a Lenovo T400s with a fast SSD got there in under 10."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Layar, the augmented reality app for the Android platform will be incorporating 3D capabilities into the application in November. They've released a tech preview this week for PICNIC '09 in Amsterdam. The preview, which is available from the Android Market (and only works with-in and around the PICNIC festival) is a significant improvement over flat pins on a map and hopefully encourages people to further investigate the use of augmented reality.

[via androidworld.nl]

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As you probably know by now, as a company gets bigger and more successful it means that they will certainly be sued for patent infringement. This isn't because they somehow "took" or "copied" someone else's ideas. But because there are so many ridiculous and overly broad patents out there that some jealous patent holder will seek to make some easy money with a lawsuit against a much more successful company. Facebook is already facing a few such lawsuits, including one where it's been ordered to reveal its entire source code.

The latest such lawsuit involves a tiny company, WhoGlue, who holds a patent 7,246,164 on "Distributed personal relationship information management system and methods." And, of course, WhoGlue has decided that Facebook infringes and needs to pay up. There are all sorts of problems with this kind of lawsuit. You have a patent on an obvious concept, that Facebook clearly developed independently (as have many others). And now Facebook will need to go spend on a legal defense. What a waste of resources.

Once again, we see that those who can't compete, sue.

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Interesting video tutorial from YouTuber casafear1 showing how to create a pneumatically actuated zombie "ground-breaker."

Make: Halloween Contest 2009

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 you could be chosen as a winner.

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The EFF has announced that a judge has sided with them in saying the federal government must reveal the records of who lobbied to get telco immunity from any warrantless wiretapping charges in last year's FISA bill. There is simply no credible explanation for granting telco immunity except to cover up illegal activity. It's a clear "get out of jail free" card. Still, I doubt that the lobbying records will turn up very much surprising. I'm sure the big telcos lobbied for it, as you would have expected.

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The latest (free) electronic edition of EE Times is online and it's devoted to the LED. Entitled "LEDs: Let There Be Lighting," the issue explores mainly the business side of LEDs and the impact that this lighting and display technology will have on the marketplace of the near-future, and in various commercial and domestic applications. There's an interesting article about white LED lamps that use UV- or purple-emitting LED chips (in the 300-400nm wavelengths) and RGB fluorescents to render much truer colors in lighting situations where that's important.

Everyone seems to be realizing the incredibly lucrative future of the LED and LED-based lights and displays and is clamoring to get in on the action. It'll be interesting to see how this all plays out in terms of accelerating technical innovations and driving economies of scale.

EE Times - September Issue

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Just posted! Our lens review of the Panasonic Lumix G 20mm F1.7 ASPH (also known, somewhat cyptically, as the H-H020). There's little doubt that this year's small-bodied Micro Four Thirds cameras have attracted a lot of attention, and by way of an appetiser for our upcoming Panasonic GF1 review, we take a look at its compact, large aperture kit lens. True to the system's spirit of cross-brand co-operation, we've also taken the opportunity to shoot an extensive samples gallery using the Olympus E-P1. Click through to discover whether we found the lens to be up to standard.

Software maker Breeze Systems has launched a Mac version of its DSLR Remote Pro software. Version 1.0 for Mac brings the remote control of Canon DSLRs to the Apple platform, allowing users to control focus, shoot time-lapse sequences and display live images from their computers. The software is now available at an introductory price of US $75.

H4x0r Jim Duggan writes "Veteran violation chasers Shane Coughlan and Armijn Hemel have summarized how license violations are caused in the consumer electronics market under time-to-market pressure and thin profit margins: 'This problem is compounded when one board with a problem appears in devices supplied to a number of western companies. A host of violation reports spanning a dozen European and American businesses may eventually point towards a single mistake during development at an Asian supplier.' They also discuss the helpful organizations which have sprung up and the documents and procedures now available."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

H4x0r Jim Duggan writes "Veteran violation chasers Shane Coughlan and Armijn Hemel have summarized how license violations are caused in the consumer electronics market under time-to-market pressure and thin profit margins: 'This problem is compounded when one board with a problem appears in devices supplied to a number of western companies. A host of violation reports spanning a dozen European and American businesses may eventually point towards a single mistake during development at an Asian supplier.' They also discuss the helpful organizations which have sprung up and the documents and procedures now available."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Over at 0-60mag.com they have a 60+ page PDF tutorial that shows you how to build an official Need For Speed SHIFT racing cockpit. This build requires a lot of space and money. The cabinet shouldn't be too expensive, but all the associated electronics are going to add up really fast.

In the Maker Shed:


In the Maker Shed: XGS AVR 8-Bit Development System

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British Airways has broken new exciting new ground in the race to make flying as awful as possible: they have announced a fee (ranging from £10-60 per passenger) for advance seat selection, explaining that this will be the only way that families and other groups travelling together can be assured that they'll be sitting next to each other. I wonder what happens if you don't pay it while flying with a two-year-old in her own seat; do they seat her at the other end of the plane from you and explain to the strangers on either side of her that they're responsible for her well-being for the duration?

Best part: BA is billing this as a way of improving the flight "experience" because you can now be certain you'll get the seat that you want. War is peace, love is hate, the airline industry cares about passengers.

A BA spokeswoman said: "Customers frequently request specific seats, but in the past we've only been able to confirm them 24 hours in advance or on the day.

"We know people want to secure them in advance and have real control over their flying experience. This will allow them to do that."

British Airways sets seat charges

The Washington Post has a not-very-surprising article highlighting how many new book authors are discovering that if they want to be successful, their publisher isn't really a huge help (unless you're a big name), and that the path to success often involves doing a ton of "grassroots" marketing yourself. If this all sounds similar to what we keep seeing musicians do today, that's because it is. The article covers some authors who have build up a significant following using the internet and social networking tools to really get themselves out there, connect with people interested in their books and sell the books. There's nothing really new or surprising in the article, but yet another example of how the whole concept of CwF + RtB applies to book authors as well.

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Vladimir goes to work on Franz. Nice bug sketch!

Nabokov Edits Kafka's Metamorphosis

Julie188 writes "You've likely heard of Microsoft's next-gen operating system projects Midori and Singularity, but earlier this month researchers released a prototype for another OS, code-named Barrelfish. Barrelfish is an OS written specifically for multicore environments. It hopes to improve the performance of boxes with such chips by creating a network bus, if you will, between cores. Today such systems tend to share resources like memory. As demand increases, performance of the box decreases as shared resources don't scale well. Barrelfish instead passes messages between cores on its bus, and reportedly uses a database-like approach to keep track of the hardware available."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In August, we wrote how music publishers were suing lyrics sites (and their owners) for daring to "profit off the backs of songwriters." That, of course, makes no sense. People go to find lyrics to music because they already like it and want to find out more about it and the creators behind it. It's good advertising. And yet, publishers have been going after lyrics sites for years. Apparently, the guy behind LyricWiki worked out a deal whereby technically he's shutting down LyricWiki (found via Fan History) but is instead rebuilding the project for Wikia (the company associated with Wikipedia). Wikia has purchased a license from the publishers. While it's good that a lawsuit is being avoided and that the project will continue (sort of), it's still rather troubling that the publishers were able to force LyricWiki into Wikia's arms. Apparently, independently repeating lyrics of a song you like isn't allowed unless you buy a license. Careful singing along... that'll be next.

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The UK Sun (an admittedly sensationalist source) claims that hundreds of people are living in the storm sewers beneath Las Vegas, scraping by on coins left in slot machines. The underground community is documented in a recent book called Beneath the Neon.

It is estimated the population of the underground community could be as many as 700. As well as credit-hustling, they earn their money off the wildly excessive city above by begging and "dumpster diving" - raiding bins and skips.

There are around 350 miles of flood channels running under Las Vegas. Most inhabitants are in the area under the city's strip.

Another couple, Amy and JR, have lived in the tunnels for two years, having moved to Las Vegas in search of work, wealth and a slice of the famous Sin City action.

Putting down the Twilight vampire book she is reading for the third time, Amy, 33, explains: "My husband and I have been down here two years this week.

"We were living with my mom in California but the house was full and we had to leave.

"I heard Las Vegas was a good place for jobs. It's the city that never sleeps, with all the bright lights, and I'd always wanted to come.

"But it was tough and we started living under the staircase outside the MGM casino. Then we met a guy who lived in the tunnels. We've been down here ever since.

Lost Vegas (Thanks, Bas!)

(Image: AUSTIN HARGRAVE)

Not sure if this is Shonen Knife playing "Twist Barbie" but I like it.

I don't know anything about this PSA advising young people to stay away from chat rooms lest the cute boy on the other end turn out to be Cthulhu, waiting to take their sanity, but I certainly support its message.

Cthulhu PSA

Al Franken's Senate career just keeps on getting better: this week he read the Fourth Amendment ("no Warrants shall issue but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.") aloud to a high-ranking Department of Justice official who was making the case for renewing the PATRIOT Act's provision for roving wiretaps.

"That's pretty explicit language," noted Franken, asking Kris how the "roving wiretap" provision of the Patriot Act can meet that requirement if it doesn't require the government to name its target.

Kris looked flustered and mumbled that "this is surreal," apparently referring to having to respond to Franken's question. "I would defer to the other branch of government," he said, referring to the courts, prompting Franken to interject: "I know what that is."

Kris explained that the courts have held that the law's requirements that the person be described, though not named, is sufficient to meet the demands of the Constitution. That did not appear to completely satisfy Franken's concerns.

Al Franken Reads the 4th Amendment to Justice Department Official (via Greg Laden)

Here is an absolutely adorkable fan-video for Plants vs Zombies by some talented Australian plants and zombies.

A Lawn Defence at Any Hour (via Wonderland)

I love the citizen science motivation behind this doula/student midwife's project to photograph her cervix every day through one entire month: "to better understand my cycle and the changes in my cervix throughout the month."

Beautiful Cervix Project (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)

This baby was designed by one Michael Ubbesen Jakobsen. From baubike.dk:

The BauBike is inspired by Bauhaus design. It is constructed around the geometric shape of the square and the equilateral triangle. The design is stripped down to clean lines and raw material. The design follows a set of formal rules, limiting the geometry to straight lines in a pattern of 60 and 90 degree angles in proportions following the principle of the golden section.

[via Recyclart]

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Jeff sez,

An iron fence on W. 21st St. in New York depicts the classic image of a rocket crashing into the Man in the Moon from Melies' 1902 pioneering science fiction film, Le Voyage dans la Lune (A Trip to the Moon).

The fence is across from the Clinton School of the Arts for Writers and Artists, and I happened to snap this photo during lunch break. After I was done shooting about 10 or so photos, I noticed that a crowd of kids had surrounded me and continued talking about the image as I walked away.

Soooo, teacher that I am, I went back and asked if any of them knew what it was. None of them did, but they agreed that it was "awesome" and wondered if the thing in his eye might be a bullet. I explained about the Melies film, its history, and what the image was supposed to be, all of which the kids said was even more awesome, so they asked me to repeat the title so they could watch the film on Youtube.

I remember being fascinated by a still of the original scene in a book when I was their age, um, many moons ago. Not only is the fence homage cool in itself, but it was wonderful to see that "A Trip to the Moon" continues to inspire.

Melies Moon Fence (Thanks, Jeff!)

Big news for many folks out there who use Eagle... Premier Farnell buys design software firm CadSoft (Eagle) - via oomlout

Premier Farnell has acquired CadSoft Computer, developer of the Eagle brand of electronic design software.

Premier Farnell will market the CAD software through its element14 online community of development engineers. It also plans to extend the CAD software's capabilities by linking it to their databases in a similar methodology to the DesignLink platform.

"The CadSoft Eagle CAD software extends our portfolio and gives us more tools to help our customers in their design process," said David Shen, Global Head of eCommerce and Technical Marketing of Premier Farnell.

Along with the launch of DesignLink, which provides a link from CAD tools to product data on Farnell's website, the acquisition of CadSoft indicates the distributor's aim to support more of the design process.

The distributor could end up paying euros12m for CadSoft whose software is used by more than 40,000 electronic design engineers throughout the US and Europe.

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Yesterday, we wrote about Google being taken to court because Rocky Mountain Bank screwed up and sent confidential information to the wrong person's gmail account. It's still not clear why they were sending confidential info to anyone's gmail account, let alone to the wrong person's. The bank tried to contact the person at the email address, but had no luck. They asked Google about who it was, but Google refused without a court order. However, the court has gone even further, and ordered Google to deactivate the entire account. While you can absolutely understand why the bank wants the account shut down, to protect that info, it's quite troubling that someone's email account just gets deactivated, despite them doing absolutely nothing wrong. Especially in an era when people rely on their email accounts for all sorts of important things, having a judge deactivate the account of someone who did nothing wrong seems quite problematic. Yes, the bank screwed up. And yes, lots of information was potentially exposed, but that should be the bank's problem -- and not the email recipient's.

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An anonymous reader writes "We recently developed a multi-user application and deployed it to our users. This is a web-based application that used to be a Windows application which was written in Delphi using Paradox databases for the client database. In the Windows application, we used the ability in Paradox to lock records which would prevent users from editing the same data. However, in the web application we did not add in a locking facility for the data due to its disconnected nature (at least that's how I was shot down). Now our users are asking to have the locking back, as they are stepping on each others' edits from time to time. I have been assigned to look at best practices for web application locking of data, and figured I would post the question here to see what others have done or to get some pointers to locations for best practices on doing locking with in a web application. I have an idea of how to do this, but don't want to taint the responses so I'll leave it off for the time being."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Well, this is getting particularly silly now. Despite claiming that she wasn't going to the meeting of various musicians in the UK to discuss Peter Mandelson's "three strikes" proposal, Lily Allen apparently did show up and said that kicking people offline was too draconian. This is, at least, a modest victory for those of us who questioned her stance. Still... it wasn't a wholesale shift. The musicians instead still agreed to support a similar three strikes plan, that just had a slightly less onerous "final solution," involving taking away most of a user's bandwidth:

"Our meeting voted to support a three-strike sanction on those who persistently download illegal files, to consist of a warning letter, a stronger warning letter, and a final sanction of the restriction of the infringers' bandwith to a level which would render file-sharing of media files impractical while leaving basic e-mail and web access functional."

That's still a pretty big overreaction to such things -- especially since none of these artists have been able to respond to the basic questions posed by many of us, asking for any evidence that the problem they face is actually unauthorized file sharing, rather than a shift in technologies and business models. Again, as we've pointed out countless times, the size of the overall UK music industry is growing, not shrinking, and those who have put in place business models that embrace file sharing have seen their own markets grow, not shrink. So, it's hard to see how the claim that "file sharing" harms the industry squares with reality. Instead, it sounds like a failure to adapt a business model is harming some artists, while other, smarter artists are doing just fine.

The group also condemned the vitriol that Allen had faced on an internet blog that she had set up to argue against music piracy.

Now, I certainly condemn any such "vitriol" as well, but again, nearly every comment I saw on the later posts on her blog were quite well thought out and well-argued. There was a lot of silly and condemnable comments on her earlier posts, but later posts brought up very good questions -- all of which Lily refused to respond to. So, I'm still having trouble believing that she shut down the blog due to any vitriol -- even if the press seems to be accepting that claim uncritically. It's also quite telling that she shut down the blog just after attention was brought to the fact that Lily herself was sharing a ton of music in the form of mixtapes.

It still seems a lot more likely that she shut down her blog not because of any vitriol, but because she was unable to respond to those questions. In fact, the brief response she had up, claimed that the mixtapes only used 30 seconds to 1 minute of songs. However, those who downloaded the mixtapes claim this is not true, and most of the songs appear to be complete versions. Furthermore, she claimed she made the mixtapes five years ago, but her own blog posts suggest it was more like three years ago... So, again, this is not vitriol, and while I'm sure there are some vitriolic commenters out there, I find it rather weak that Lily and these other musicians are refusing to respond to some very serious questions by hiding behind a claim that she was somehow unfairly "attacked." Playing victim when you were caught doing the very thing you condemn isn't particularly convincing.

I will say that I hope that many of those reasoned, well-thought out and carefully argued comments on Lily's blog before she erased it were part of what convinced her that her original support for cutting people off of the internet entirely was wrong. At least that was a small victory for reasoned debate. It's only unfortunate that once the debate started to reach more serious questions, she stopped participating. And, once again, given that she, herself, appeared to have shared a large amount of music, I have to ask if she's willing to accept the same limitations on her internet access that she came out in support of tonight. Will she accept limited bandwidth, so she can do basic web surfing and email, but no more? If not, how is that fair?

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My first Arduino project was blinking an LED. Dennis decided his first project should be a remote controlled webcam! Check out the link for more information, including the source code.

Having received my first Arduino I had to come up with a good first microcontroller project. Something not too complicated but more than just a book example. I had just purchased a wireless webcam (Linksys WVC54GCA) and thought it would be cool if I could move it around on a pan & tilt mechanism. And how much cooler would it be to be able to control it over the internet?

In the Maker Shed:


Make: Arduino

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What could be better than a tube amplifier? How about an entire surround sound system built using tubes! Radar hacker Greg Charvat built such a beast back in 2005, and he refers to it affectionately as Frankenstein. Besides being an excellent, high-powered stereo, word on the street is that it also functions as a very capable space heater.

This is a good example of a project that has become completely out of control. At some point in the past I decided to build an all-tube home theater system (except for the DSP stuff that decodes the various Dolby 5.1, and etc signals). The result of this effort is affectionately known as "Frankenstein." It consists of 5 class AB tube power amplifiers, tube pre-amps, and a Dolby 5.1/DTS digital signal processor, for a total of 27 vacuum tubes. Each power amplifier is capable of over 400 watts peak output. All of the equipment is mounted in a 7' tall WW2 vintage equipment rack.

Schematics and engineering notes are available on his website, if you are up to the challenge.

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And here we go again... The whole "network neutrality" discussion really burst onto the scene in 2005, when (then) SBC CEO Ed Whitacre made claims that Google was somehow "free riding" on SBC's (now AT&T's) network. Of course, that made no sense. Everyone pays for their own bandwidth. The only way that would make sense is if the bandwidth you paid for only brought you to the internet backbone, but never to an end point. Yet, that seemed to be exactly what Whitacre was claiming. You see, the bandwidth you pay for is only supposed to get you onto the internet. To actually reach a site, in this logic, the site owners then should have to pay to let you reach from the internet to their site (never mind that they already pay bandwidth themselves... in this logic, that's only the bandwidth from themselves out to the network, but not from the network for you to reach the site).

This, of course, makes no sense at all. And yet, PR people and telco lobbyists know that it makes for a good soundbite. Mike McCurry, a former Clinton aide who went on to run a telco lobbying group (and now runs an entertainment industry lobbying group) declared in 2006 that Google was getting such a free ride that they "never have to pay a dime no matter how much bandwidth they use." In response, I challenged McCurry and his organization (Hands Off The Internet) to pay Google's bandwidth bill. While the group clearly read (but did not understand) Techdirt, they never responded to the challenge (shocker), and Google had to go on paying its own bill -- though, McCurry assures us that it's not even a dime.

We had thought that such ridiculous reasoning had finally been taken away from the debate, but with the FCC back to pushing for net neutrality, we're seeing the argument pop up again. Holman W. Jenkins Jr., a WSJ editor has an editorial making the same bogus free rider arguments yet again, and accusing Google of wanting "internet socialism." Karl Bode, over at Broadband Reports provides a rather epic response (this is just a snippet -- read the whole thing):

It doesn't matter how many times you point out that companies like Google pay millions of dollars for bandwidth and their own infrastructure, the paid talking heads who work for Verizon and AT&T simply keep repeating the same myth. Telling these individuals that AOL users paid phone companies billions in tolls and long-distance fees will get you nowhere. By demonizing Google and repeating nonsense, Jenkins and AT&T can distract marginally unintelligent lawmakers, journalists and the public from the real issues. Unfortunately, they're right.

Yes, companies like Google are not saints. Yes, Google is solely interested in dominating the advertising industry. Yes, companies like Google can and possibly will turn into anti-competitive tyrants over time who violate user privacy and do everything in their power to obliterate competitors. However, the network neutrality debate was not started by Google. It was started by a very confused Ed Whitacre.

Network neutrality has always been about phone and cable companies trying to maintain power in the face of Internet evolution. If network neutrality confuses you (and it pretty clearly confuses Mr. Jenkins), at least understand one thing: network neutrality has always been about phone and cable companies trying to maintain power in the face of Internet evolution. You can't blame phone company executives for being terrified. They should be.

The evolution of the Internet is strangling decades old cash cows, herded across analog fields by monopoly dinosaurs who've been pampered by Uncle Sam for generations. As voice becomes simply data, charging nine dollars for services like caller ID or call waiting (both of which costs pennies to provide) becomes untenable. Suddenly, programs like Google Voice allow users to send free SMS messages, eroding hugely profitable SMS revenue. AT&T and Verizon, protected from competition for so long, are coming face to face with reality for the first time in generations.

With voice, video and other services all just bits, broadband has made cable and phone company empires as service providers irrelevant, whether they know it yet or not. That leaves them with one purpose: running a network. And while the baby bells make a perfectly healthy fortune simply selling flat-rate bandwidth in this new paradigm, investor pressure and the need for quarter over quarter stock improvement makes simply being incredibly profitable not good enough.

I have to admire one trick, however. Jenkins did flip one of the common stories. Usually the anti-net neutrality stories focus on the massive rise in internet growth and the threat of some non-existent "exaflood." Jenkins admits that's bogus: "Broadband growth is leveling out in the U.S." But... rather than note how telcos have been using the exaflood story to push for the right to break net neutrality, he pretends that this also is a reason to break net neutrality, because it means that broadband providers have to compete to steal customers from each other, and can't risk pissing off customers by blocking sites. Of course, that only works if there's real competition. And, in most markets, people have at most 2 providers. If both of them break net neutrality... then what?

While some will now insist that I support the legislation being proposed, let me make it clear that I do not. I am worried about the long term impact here. But, I do believe that the principles of network neutrality should be preserved, even as I worry about how the government might do it. And I am most certainly not convinced by the ridiculous arguments put forth about such "free riding." So, let's make the same offer to the WSJ that we made to Mike McCurry all those years ago. If you honestly believe that Google is "free riding" thanks to net neutrality, will you agree to pay Google's bandwidth bill? How about you exchange yours for theirs and make it a fair trade? Since they're doing so much free riding... it's cheap, right?

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

Professional animators script, record, and "lock" audio before animating a frame. Josh Dolgin and I are not professional animators.

We wanted 500 Pound Planet to have a loose, improvisatory feel. So we decided on a general plot outline, a handful of settings and scenes and a cast of characters. For each character, we animated a number of facial expressions, hand gestures and lip-positions, so that we could figure out what they're saying at any point and drop it in.

This "worked" in a sense, but also made for a lot of crazy, since everything was infinitely malleable. We could always record more, tweak a line, second-guess a plot point- whatever. The process became so maddening that we bickered constantly over every detail and bit by bit, that's what the film became about- our spiteful, imploding "marriage", which we kept alive for the sake of the children- our deformed, clay puppet kids. Enjoy!

Previously:

500 Pound Planet: Prelude

500 Pound Planet: Chapter One

500 Pound Planet: Chapter Two