Jeff Kepner, the first person in England the US to receive two hand transplants, is now home after four months of recovery at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. From LancasterOnline.com:

In a strange way, the double transplant was a bit of setback for Kepner, who had lost part of both of his arms and legs in 1999. Doctors amputated the limbs in a bid to save his life after Kepner came down with a strep infection that plunged him into a coma.

After the amputations, Kepner was outfitted with prosthetic hands and feet and forged on with his life.

"He had gotten quite used to his hooks," his mother says of her son's artificial arms. "He could dress himself. He could drive his car. He could do a lot of things..."

Now in therapy (after the transplants), he is learning how to pick up small items, like cotton balls, and catch a ball, but he still has no feeling in his fingers. The nerves grow about an inch a month from where the hands were attached, at the forearm.

"They told him it will be at least until the end of the year before those nerves get down into those fingers," Doris Schafer said. "Then he'll begin to do things."

"Ex-county man ready to go home after double-hand transplant" (via Fortean Times)

An anonymous reader writes "As we discussed last month, the Canadian government has introduced Internet surveillance legislation that requires ISPs to disclose customer information without a warrant. Peter Van Loan, the Minister in charge, claims that a Vancouver kidnapping earlier this year shows the need for these powers. Michael Geist did some digging and revealed this as a lie — the Vancouver police acknowledge that the case did not involve an ISP request and the suspect is now in custody."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

viralMeme sends in a piece from OLPC News featuring a video interview with Pixel Qi's Mary Lou Jepson. The interview goes over some of the improvements in the company's extremely power-eficient screen technology that will show up in the next generations of the OLPC. The article links a video side-by-side comparison among Pixel Qi, Kindle, and Toshiba R600 displays in sunlight and in shade; Pixel Qi is arguably more readable than Kindle, and in full color. Jepson refers to Clayton Christenson's 1997 classic The Innovator's Dilemma, explaining a seeming paradox in high-tech: why companies that listen to their customers aren't the ones that innovate. According to the article it's mainly because "the next big market isn't with your current customers. It's with a vastly larger group of would-be users who couldn't afford your previous products, or couldn't carry around the huge devices of previous generations." Jepson says "The cool thing about the Pixel Qi technology is, you know, poor kids in Africa got it first... It's the classic Innovator's Dilemma."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Doctor Popular writes:

Today is 24 Hour Comic Book Day, meaning artists all over the world will be attempting to write and draw their own 24 page comics in 24 consecutive hours. Nearly 40 artists will be attempting the challenge in San Francisco and we'll be live broadcasting the entire time... if you like watching people drawing.

To learn more about 24hcbd check out 24hourcomicsday.com.
Each SF location will have it's own stream, you can see them embedded on blog.missioncomicsandart.com and comicoutpost.blogspot.com

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Boing Boing guestblogger Mitch Horowitz is author of Occult America: The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation and editor-in-chief of Tarcher/Penguin publishers.

Parade magazine publishes a new poll tomorrow - with a piece on CBS Sunday Morning that I'm part of - which reveals the fluid and expanding meaning of spirituality in America. Fifty-nine percent Americans polled agree that "all religions have validity" and only twelve percent agree that "mine is the only true religion." To an extent, this reflects an attitude introduced into America by Enlightenment philosophy, Freemasonry, Transcendentalism, and, most recently, Theosophy in the late 19th century. Theosophy emphasized the principle that all religions emerge from a universal source. Likewise, the survey reflects the inroads of what might be considered occult or New Age outlooks in America: Seven percent of Americans believe in reincarnation (a concept that few Americans had heard of a generation ago); seventeen percent report having contact with the dead; forty-nine percent read horoscopes "for fun," whereas twelve percent are believers. The poll reveals many other wrinkles, which readers will find cause for cheer or depression, depending upon their outlook. But consider: Gandhi, whose 140th birthday fell yesterday, was making what was considered a radical statement when he declared that "all religions are true" (to which he also added, "all have some error in them"). Today, a majority of Americans agree.

CBS Sunday Morning runs its piece tomorrow at 9 a.m. EST in which I will discuss "the history of the occult in the United States."

What We Believe (CBS Sunday Morning)

Spirituality Poll results (Parade magazine)

s31523 writes "I love my current laptop, but unfortunately on my last trip the primary LCD went bonkers. It's an older Gateway (2 GB RAM Intel Pentium M 2.0 GHz, ATI M7). There are a handful of features I love about it: [1] Hot-swappable drive bay, with several components that can go in: CD/DVD R/W, extra battery, floppy drive, extra hard drive, memory card reader, etc. The extra battery option is especially appreciated — I can go 4-5 hours on battery power. [2] Docking station / port replicator: I like having my home setup with keyboard, network, and dual screens (a necessity). [3] It runs Linux. OK, I'm a wus, I actually have GRUB command three different OS's: Windows 98 (I have really old embedded software compilers that only run on 98, and yes I have tried every trick in the book to make them run on Linux), Windows XP Pro, and Ubuntu. I'm trying to find a replacement setup that offers the same flexibility and a little better performance. I am open to change as well. So, I ask Slashdot: What is your pick for best developer's laptop under $1,200, considering the features above?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes "Palm's cat and mouse game with Apple continues. Ignoring the warning from the USB Implementers Forum, with its WebOS 1.2.1 release this morning Palm has restored iTunes media synchronization in its new Pre smartphone — and gone so far as to extend sync to photos. And, according to Digital Daily, it has done this, once again, by using Apple's USB vendor ID. Does the USB-IF have any recourse here? Does Apple?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Brad has a good start on what looks to be an ambitious electrical engineering project. Inspired by the Apollo guidance computer, he is constructing his own CPU using TTL logic chips and wire wrap. He's taking a little liberty with the design, using EEPROM chips for opcode decoding instead of hardwiring it all, but I think that can be excused. If you want to follow along and get some tips for your project, he also has a wiki to document his progress.

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apatrick writes "A recent research report by Heith Copes (University of Alabama at Birmingham) and Lynne Vieraitis (University of Texas at Austin) has examined identity thieves and their methods. Copes and Vieraitis searched federal court records in the US for people convicted of identity theft and then tried to find out where they were serving their sentences. They were able to find 297 inmates, from which they sampled 59 inmates in 14 prisons across the country. The convicts agreed to do detailed interviews, in private, to talk about themselves and their crimes, and the results are reported in a recent issue of Criminal Justice Review. According to Copes and Vieraitis, 'it is best categorized as an economic crime committed by a wide range of people from diverse backgrounds through a variety of legitimate (e.g., mortgage broker) and illegitimate (e.g., burglar) occupations.' As to the issue of whether these are white-collar criminals, the authors say: 'Despite public perceptions of identity theft being a high-tech, computer driven crime, it is rather mundane and requires few technical skills. Identity thieves do not need to know how to hack into large, secure databases. They can simply dig through garbage or pay insiders for information. No particular group has a monopoly on the skills needed to be a capable identity thief.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

pickens writes "Fifty years ago on October 2, American television viewers first heard the words: 'You're moving into a land of both shadow and substance, of things and ideas. You've just crossed over into... the Twilight Zone.' Like the time-space warps that anchored so many of the show's plots, Rod Serling's veiled commentary remains as soul-baring today as it did a half-century ago, and the show's popularity endures in multiple facets of American pop culture, appearing nearly uninterrupted through television, syndication and DVD releases and under license to air in 30 countries. 'The whole idea of "The Twilight Zone" jumped off the television screen and became a catchphrase, a buzzword for something much beyond the TV show itself,' says Robert Thompson, director of the Center for the Study of Popular Television at Syracuse University. 'When you say Twilight Zone, it's its own genre.' The original show ran just five seasons, 1959 to 1964, with 156 episodes filmed; Serling wrote 92 of them, and other contributors included Richard Matheson and Ray Bradbury. Anniversary observances were held at Ithaca College in New York, where Serling taught from 1967 until his death in 1975, and which keeps Serling's archives; and also at Antioch College in Ohio, where Serling was a student."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I spent most of last week in NY, visiting my parents.

My father has been gravely ill, and as it turns out this was my last visit to see him.

This morning he died.

He's had a long decline and plenty of time to prepare for the end. This week we talked honestly and openly about the big things. In June, on his 80th birthday I wrote to him that he was my hero. There was a lot of forgiveness in that statement, over the years, we had focused too much on the bad times, and not enough on the time at the beginning and at the end, which were good, loving, generous and fair.

There's no doubt my father loved the little boy who looked up to him. There's no doubt we both had trouble adjusting to the man who took the little boy's place.

I was lucky that my father lived so long. Yet today there is a huge void, a puzzle, an unknown. How do you fill the space occupied by someone who looms so large.

My father fought for my life when I was young and had a ruptured appendix.

When he discovered the beauty of outliners he said the nicest thing a father can say about a son -- "Every day is father's day."

We searched for my father, lost in the melee after the 9/11 attacks. His picture only appeared that once on Scripting News.

Leon Winer was born on June 17, 1929 and died on October 3, 2009.

He will be missed by his family.

Recently, we are working in class on a variation of the Rock and Roll speakers from Fashioning Technology. Rather than using perfboard for the circuit, we'll be burning our own circuit board. The chips are through-hole LM386's, but I don't think it is realistic to have the students drill 8 aligned holes on the circuit board at this point in the course. Jockeying for time on the drill press would create a logjam in the project. There is an excellent primer on printed circuit board etching in MAKE, Volume 02. After thinking this through a bit, I came up with an idea to turn the through-hole component into a smd component. The technique is a bit like the design of the Broadcast Your Podcast FM transmitter circuit, which just has you solder the components together in pools of solder on chips of board. However, in the BYP project, there is no custom board, the blank copper clad board is cut with a utility knife to create the various connecting points.

When the chips finally arrived from Electronic Goldmine, I looked up the datasheet for the LM386 to get the measurements. In Open Office Draw, I drew out a design that would match up with the pins. With the help of Pat, who is doing an independent study on CNC tools this year, I sent the file to the machine with the vinyl cutter. He cut the file, then we weeded it to see if it matched the chip. The file matched the pin locations of the chip, so we made a few more iterations to get the process down and the layout right. When we got it right, we cut three copies of the file for boardmaking.

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Doctor Popular says,

Today is 24hour Comic Book Day. Cartoonists all over the world will be taking part in the challenge of creating an entire 24 page comic book in just one day. Robots Don't Know Anything About Twitter, which was featured on BB a few weeks ago, was created as part of last years 24HCBDay!

Here are some links: Nationwide, in SF, in Minneapolis, in Albuquerque

Image: snapshot from 24HCBDay in New Mexico in 2006, by baaadasssscomics. Also, here's a Flickr pool.

jamie points out that Perl 5.11.0 was released yesterday, as well as a schedule for future 5.11.x releases, planned for the 20th of every month. Jesse Vincent encouraged testing of the new (development) version, saying, "If you write software in Perl, it is particularly important that you test your software against development releases. While we strive to maintain source compatibility with prior releases wherever possible, it is always possible that a well-intentioned change can have unexpected consequences. If you spot a change in a development release which breaks your code, it's much more likely that we will be able to fix it before the next stable release. If you only test your code against stable releases of Perl, it may not be possible to undo a backwards-incompatible change which breaks your code."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

ThirdVoice was small and never got large.

As long as very few people used it, it was no threat to free speech, but...

What if Microsoft, who made the dominant web browser at the time, decided to either acquire ThirdVoice or create their own?

Then almost everyone who read my site would see the commentary first. Yes, that most definitely would have changed the web, for the worse.

If we hadn't objected to ThirdVoice that would have provided all the excuse Microsoft needed.

And Microsoft did try to muck around with web content. But they backed down when the web community strenuously objected.

Now fast-forward to Google and its Toolbar and the cutely named WikiSidebar. Clever trick. Could have named it PuppySidebar. Now we'd be seeming to criticize puppies. Some people must think that Google's neo-ThirdVoice is actually a wiki, but of course it's nothing like a wiki.

And Google has more staying power than ThirdVoice. And they have ambitions to be the leading browser vendor and they have a chance. Then someday soon we may have the ability to annotate any page on the web. Sounds great that way, but do you want everyone viewing the annotated view of your writing? I don't.

Phil Windley, who is (I guess) a libertarian, thinks everyone should have the right to view the web any way they want. Who could argue with that. He says my website is not a place, instead I should look at the components. It's actually a collection of documents that can be transferred from one machine to another over a network. But his bank account, like my website, is just a collection of documents that can be transferred from one machine to another over a network. I doubt if Phil thinks we ought to be able to use his money any way we'd like. Maybe he does. He's surprised me before.

We buy into illusions that virtual things are real all the time, our way of life depends on it. The pieces of paper in our wallet used to be redeemable for bars of gold, they were virtual then, now they're not even virtual because the linkage to gold no longer exists. Even the wood, glass and concrete that makes up a "house" is something that is given meaning by a piece of paper that says Phil owns it, and not a welfare mother in downtown Salt Lake City. Why should he get to live in that collection of wood and concrete, stay warm in the Utah winter, when other people are cold and go hungry? Because we have conventions. And Phil, even though he doesn't trust government, depends on government to keep him in his house. Otherwise he would surely be out on the street. (Not saying that would be right, it just illustrates that the world isn't so harsh as to say that we have no say in how what we own is used.)

I don't mind if a small group of people wants to annotate my writing, off on the side, without effecting how other people read it. But that's not what Google is proposing, long-term, to do here. We have to object at the beginning, or we'll have no standing later. My website expresses my point of view. I get to take risky positions, ones that are complicated to explain because I know that here, unlike almost everywhere else, I get to finish a thought. There are so many places for "conversation" -- virtually everywhere. I like my website because it is not one of those places. And yes Phil it is a place, every bit as much as your collection of wood and concrete is.

This really is my intellectual home. And I think the government should protect it, the same way the government protects my bank account. If Google wants comments, great, put it on their own site. But unless I ask for it, stay out of my space.

Earthquake Retrofit writes "NASA has released an extensive report (PDF) on science results from over 100 experiments performed at the International Space Station. From the summary: 'One of the most compelling results reported is the confirmation that the ability of common germs to cause disease increases during spaceflight, but that changing the growth environment of the bacteria can control this virulence. The Effect of Spaceflight on Microbial Gene Expression and Virulence experiment identified increased virulence of space-flown Salmonella typhimurium, a leading cause of food poisoning. New research on subsequent station missions will target development of a vaccine for this widespread malady." I can't tell if this is good news, bad or both. Also from a quick look at the report, I see that soybeans grow bigger in space with no harmful effect."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Hawking now Director of Research at Cambridge... Steps down as Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University...

A transcription of physicist Stephen Hawking's audio message to Newsnight in which he explains why he is standing down from the prestigious academic title of Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University. Previous holders of the position include Sir Isaac Newton and Charles Babbage.

Ok gang, PREDICTION TIME who will be the next Lucasian Professor of Mathematics? Post your prediction(s) up in the comments, winner will gets a copy of Astronomy Hacks.

So far it's been...

1664 Isaac Barrow
1669 Sir Isaac Newton
1702 William Whiston
1711 Nicholas Saunderson
1739 John Colson
1760 Edward Waring
1798 Isaac Milner
1820 Robert Woodhouse
1822 Thomas Turton
1826 Sir George Biddell Airy
1828 Charles Babbage
1839 Joshua King
1849 Sir George Stokes
1903 Sir Joseph Larmor
1932 Paul Dirac
1969 Sir James Lighthill
1979 Stephen Hawking


In 2395 it will be Data, but that won't happen for awhile.

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We recently had a question from a reader about this prop. "Connie" wrote in wanting to know how to replicate the mechanism that, in the movie, is used to unlock The Book's cover. Never having seen The Mummy, I went into research mode and enqueued it from Netflix. Then I watched it. Big mistake.

But, you know, to each his or her own. And "The Book of the Dead," with its ornate clasps and intricate star-shaped key, is admittedly an awesome prop. The scene Connie is referring to, I believe, occurs at almost exactly one hour into the "Deluxe Edition" cut of the film, and shows the intrepid but remarkably foolish archeologists inserting the aforementioned star-shaped key into a correspondingly star-shaped opening in the book's cover, turning it, and thereby releasing the spring-loaded cover clasps and, with them, all manner of unpleasant whatnot.

So I started Googling around, looking for dweebs enthusiasts that might have already built such a thing. And while I did not find any working mechanical replicas of the prop, I did discover the remarkably beautiful static replica shown in the photo at the top of this post by Jeff Stelter of Stelter Creative Woodworks.

I also found this video by YouTuber oneandonlyJadedMonk showing his working mechanical replica of the star-shaped key used to open the book. Connie, if you're looking for a real expert, I think this might be the man to talk to.

But as for completely working cover locks, I'm afraid I have to admit defeat. Having watched the scene a few times, I'm completely confident that a suitable lockwork could be designed and built, but actually doing either is well above my pay grade. But something I've learned writing for this blog is what an incredible resource the MAKE readership can be, and so I'm going to throw the question out to them.

How 'bout it, folks? Anybody know how this thing works? Or know of somebody's who has built one? Or, even better, know anything about the original prop?

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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An anonymous reader writes "Yesterday, Chicago lost its bid for the 2016 Olympics (which went to Rio de Janiero instead), and it's looking very likely that US border procedures were one of the main factors which knocked Chicago out of the race: 'Among the toughest questions posed to the Chicago bid team this week in Copenhagen was one that raised the issue of what kind of welcome foreigners would get from airport officials when they arrived in this country to attend the Games. Syed Shahid Ali, an I.O.C. member from Pakistan, in the question-and-answer session following Chicago's official presentation, pointed out that entering the United States can be "a rather harrowing experience." ... The exchange underscores what tourism officials here have been saying for years about the sometimes rigorous entry process for foreigners, which they see as a deterrent to tourism.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

fragMasterFlash writes with this excerpt from SemiAccurate: 'In a really pathetic display, Nvidia actually faked the introduction of its latest video card, because it simply doesn't have boards to show. Why? Because it didn't get enough parts to properly bring them up, much less make demo boards. ... Notice that the three screws that hold the end plate on are, well, generic wood screws. Large flat -head Phillips screws. Home Depot-grade screws that don't even sit flush. If a card is real, you hold it on with the bolts on either side of the DVI connector. Go look at any GPU you have; do you see wood screws that don't mount flush or DVI flanking bolts? ... If you look at the back of the fake Fermi, [from this PC Watch picture], you can see that the expected DVI connector wires are not there, just solder-filled holes. No stubs, no tool marks from where they would be cut out. Basically, the DVI port isn't connected to anything with solder, so they had to use screws on the plate."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Via CNET, Sam 3.14 writes -

What's to be done with their corporeal remains after a geek has left for that great data bank in the sky? For my recently departed brother (long illness, Don't Smoke!!!), I thought this nice SPARCstation would be a cool place to spend eternity. Yes, he's really in there (after cremation). I kept the floppy drive cover but for space reasons removed the floppy drive, hard drive, and most of the power supply. I left behind the motherboard and power switch and plugs to keep all openings covered. The case worked quite well at his memorial party. His friends and family were able to leave their final good-byes on post-it notes. Anyone who wanted to keep their words private could just slip their note into the case through the floppy slot. (See the next photo. ) All notes will be sealed in plastic and placed within the case. There has been one complication. His daughters like the look of it so much they aren't now sure if they want to bury him. One more thing: the words on the plaque really do capture one of the last things he ever said. Of course as kids we watched the original show in its first run.

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coldmist writes "Sen. Thomas Carper (D-Del.) is on the Senate Finance Committee, which just finished work on the health care bill. The committee recently rejected an amendment which would have required them to post the legislation for public viewing for 72 hours before it went to final vote. Several senators felt that the actual legal code would be too cryptic and complicated to be useful. Carper himself said, 'I don't expect to actually read the legislative language because reading the legislative language is among the more confusing things I've ever read in my life.' So, why don't they put it in SVN (or some similar version control system) where people can tkdiff the changes (i.e. new legislation is in a branch) or output a patchset? If a bill is passed, it's merged into the trunk. It just seems so logical to me, yet I can't find any mention of doing this on the web. What do you think?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Sony has now officially launched the new version of their portable game console, the PSP Go, and the Opposable Thumbs blog took it for a spin to see how they liked it. Their impressions of the new hardware are almost entirely negative, despite being fans of the original PSP. One major point of contention was Sony's removal of the UMD drive in this revision, making it so you need to access the PlayStation Store to buy games. This kills price competition and used game sales in one fell swoop, while also making owners of any original PSP games unable to play them on the new hardware. The review says the new device looks sleek, but the dimensions make it somewhat cramped and awkward to use unless you have small hands. They also decry the switch to proprietary cables, and sum up their opinion by saying, "When your older, cheaper hardware is better and more able than your new offering, you need to fire some designers."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

the monolith writes "Back in August, the company supplying bandwidth to The Pirate Bay was forced to disconnect them. Quoting TorrentFreak: '"It took just 20 minutes before the Hollywood companies telephoned the new host who took over operation of The Pirate Bay," commented Patrik from the ISP which had been indirectly supplying bandwidth to TPB. Despite initially putting on a brave face and standing strong, Patrik's company continued to feel the heat. It is not a large outfit and doesn't have the resources to fight the entertainment industry and its threats. Last night, Patrik could hold off no longer after receiving mounting threats from the entertainment industries, which culminated in threats of a court summons. Having come this far, there is little doubt that IFPI and the MPAA would litigate if necessary. ... On the heels of several rumors today, Patrik said he could confirm news of the move, saying that he believes The Pirate Bay is now hosted in Ukraine.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Book Review - 'Logicomix' - A Comic Book About Logic, Math and Madness - Review @ NYTimes.com via .

Well, this is unexpected — a comic book about the quest for logical certainty in mathematics. The story spans the decades from the late 19th century to World War II, a period when the nature of mathematical truth was being furiously debated. The stellar cast, headed up by Bertrand Russell, includes the greatest philosophers, logicians and mathematicians of the era, along with sundry wives and mistresses, plus a couple of homicidal maniacs, an apocryphal barber and Adolf Hitler.

Improbable material for comic-book treatment? Not really. The principals in this intellectual drama are superheroes of a sort. They go up against a powerful nemesis, who might be called Dark Antinomy. Each is haunted by an inner demon, the Specter of Madness. Their quest has a tragic arc, not unlike that of Superman or Donald Duck.

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With all of the fighting over the Google Book settlement, it seems that an awful lot of people have lost sight of the key issue, which is that the tool itself, Google's Book Search, is amazing. We had mentioned this a couple of years ago. But if you step back from any of the legal issues, and just think about Google's book search as a tool, you realize what a wonderful cultural milestone it would be to make pretty much every book searchable. The more you think about it, the harder it is to take seriously anyone who is against this project. It's the equivalent of saying we should burn down all libraries because authors don't get paid every time someone checks out a book.

Luckily, even as the legal dispute continues, we're starting to see more people realize what a terrible thing it would be to kill off such a valuable resource. In that last link, law professor Peter Friedman not only discusses the Google Books project, but also Scribd, and makes a key point:

Why would you use copyright to stifle marvelous new innovations? Copyright exists to encourage, not stifle, invention.

What's scary about the discussions on the settlement, though, is that they don't seem to focus on this at all. Instead, almost all of them seem to be a weak excuse to attack Google because people don't like -- or don't like having to compete with -- Google.

Now, I've been clear since the day the settlement was announced that I thought it was a bad thing -- but not for the reasons most are stating. I thought it was bad because Google had a strong case for claiming that the project was covered by fair use. It was effectively no different than creating a fantastic card catalog -- again, something that should be encouraged. But, as Tim Lee brilliantly notes in a recent post, even if this whole lawsuit was over "fair use," what was so troubling about the settlement was that it deals with a bunch of other issues and sort of ignores the fair use issue! And yet, that was the center of the lawsuit.

In case we've forgotten, this is a copyright infringement case. The dispute between Google and the plaintiffs is not about orphan works, online book sales, or the structure of the publishing industry. It's about whether copyright's fair use doctrine allows the creation of a book search engine that displays "snippets" of in-copyright books in search results. Google says yes. Some publishers and authors said no. Absent a settlement, a judge would have been asked to rule on that question.

In a rational world, the settlement of the case would focus on that same question. Instead, we got a settlement in which the underlying infringement claims are treated as an afterthought. Instead, the focus is on the creation of an elaborate new structure for selling books online. It's as if Sony Pictures sued NBC for copyright infringement and then wound up with a "settlement" that focused mostly on Sony becoming a partner in GE's light bulb business.

And, indeed. So, why can't we bring the whole thing back into focus. Having a resource like Google's book search is an incredibly important and valuable cultural tool. It should be celebrated, not hated. But the key question is Google's legal right to create it. Any settlement should be focused on that issue, and not all of these extraneous things that are being shoved through the class action process. The settlement is bad, but Google's Book Search is an unequivocally good thing. Keep that in focus, and a lot of the sideshows melt away as meaningless.

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There's just something when we see a dominant technology out there that makes people assume that no one will ever out innovate it, and then fear that we're stuck with the dominant player forever. Adam Theirer has a post discussing this concept in relation to a recent paper by Robert Hahn and Hal Singer, Why the iPhone Won't Last Forever and What the Government Should Do to Promote its Successor, which highlights how dominant platforms often appear insurmountable, but often quickly are defeated from unexpected sources. Thus, worrying about things like exclusive arrangements or if the platform is too closed off may be a waste of time. Eventually, the market ends up taking care of it. The paper points out that previous technologies are often declared the "end of innovation" as well, such as the Motorola MicroTAC flip phone (I had one, ages ago), which Fortune described in 1989 by saying:

Portable phones won't get a lot smaller than this one. After all, they have to reach from your ear to your mouth.

Take a look: And no more innovation ever happened in mobile phones over the past twenty years, right?

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Today Spamhaus announced they are releasing a new list of IP addresses from which they've been receiving "snowshoe" spam — unsolicited email distributed across many IPs and domains in order to avoid triggering volume-based filters. "This spam is sent from many small IP ranges on many Internet Service Providers (ISPs), using many different domains, and the IPs and domains change rapidly, making it difficult for people and places to detect and block this spam. Most importantly, while each host/IP usually sends a modest volume of bulk email, collectively these anonymous IP ranges send a great deal of spam, and the quantities of this type of spam have been increasing rapidly over the past few months." A post at the Enemies List anti-spam blog wonders at the impact this will have on email service providers and their customers. The author references a conversation he had with an employee from one of these providers: "... I replied that I expected it to mean the more legitimate clients of the sneakier gray- and black-hat spammers would migrate to more legitimate ESPs — suggesting that it was, in the long run, a good thing, because ESPs with transparency and a reputation to protect will educate their new clients. His reply was essentially that this would be a problem for them in the short run, because it would swamp their new customer vetting processes and so on."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ever wish you had a friend to unicycle with you? Well, I don't actually know how to unicycle, but I still want one of these robots to follow me around. Has anyone tried combining this one with the hopping robot? That would be a fun control systems problem.

[via technabob]

Related:

• Enicycle one-wheeled scooter
• LEGO unicycle robot keeps its balance
• Self balancing unicycle... for sale soon! (video)

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Here is yet another example of how "free" can co-exist with paid content, even when the content is basically identical.

Recently, Showtime made the season premiers of their hit shows DEXTER and CALIFORNICATION on YouTube for anyone to watch for free.  So, did this gut their numbers when the shows aired on their subscription-only, kind of expensive if you ask me, premium cable network?

Both Dexter and Californication scored some huge opening numbers last Sunday with Dexter setting a new opening record for the cable network.

More than 1.5 million sets of eyeballs tuned to the season four opener for Dexter and 821,000 stayed to watch the opener for Californication. That's 3 million single eyeballs for Dexter and more than 1.6 million for Californication.

Guess not.

Crossposted from MyMediaMusings

Dave Title is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Dave Title and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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Bassam Tariq is a Boing Boing guestblogger who is the co-author of 30 Mosques. A blog celebrating the NYC mosques during the Islamic month of Ramadan. He lives in Harlem, NY.



For your Friday, here is a nice video of a spoon box making music. How does the spoon box you work you ask? Well, since it's made by The Books, we'll let them answer it:

This will take a little bit of explaining. I built this prototype of the Spoonbox out of wood, plexiglass, zinc plates, measuring spoons, and closeout radioshack parts. It hooks up to a CD player and small amplifier which cause the spoons to dance. There are small speakers behind the spoons that move in response to the sounds on the CD which I carefully composed using low frequency sine waves and kitchen sounds. The speakers, in turn, blow small puffs of air into the spoons which cause them to bounce/vibrate in rhythmic patterns. It really must be seen to be understood, but this video might give you some sense of what it does.

I just got off the phone with Nick Zammuto, 1/2 of The Books, and will be sharing with you our discussion this weekend. The Books are one of the most important bands of this decade and come this weekend, I will try my best to convince you why.

Until then, here are two tracks from their LPs. Tokyo and That Right Aint Shit both can be found on The Lemon of Pink, released in 2003. Happy Listening and Happy Friday.

We keep hearing from newspaper execs about how important it is to keep newspapers alive to fund all that important "investigative reporting." The problem, of course, is that most newspapers don't really do all that much investigative reporting. Hell, they don't really do that much reporting at all. A few months back, we noted that a quick look at a variety of local newspapers all showed a very small number of locally produced stories (usually under 10) each day. All the rest were wire stories and other stuff -- not much actual local reporting at all. As a whole bunch of you are sending in, Clay Shirky recently did a similar experiment, taking apart his local hometown newspaper, slicing the paper up into "news" and "other" categories, and finding that news was a small fraction. And most of the news was wire service. Actual locally produced news involved only six reporter bylines. In investigating further, he discovered that the paper only had six reporters -- despite a staff of 59 people. And, yes, obviously many of those other roles are important -- the editors, the printers, etc. But, at some point you have to question the claim that the "reporting" is so expensive. It certainly looks like there's an awful lot of overhead and inefficiency built into the system. And that's why newer news startups are able to succeed -- because they don't have that extra legacy layer of fat to deal with.

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Continuing a great tradition, the New England Wireless and Steam Museum is hosting the Yankee Steam-Up, where you can see steam engines large and small, stirling engines, running antique engines and vehicles, and much more. There is also a Marconi-era wireless museum with fascinating equipment from the early days of radio, including a Massie Station spark gap transmitter.

Check out some great videos of running steam engines from last year's event here.

The Original Yankee Steam-Up:
For model makers, machinists, engineers & historians
Saturday October 3, 2009
8:30AM-4:00PM

1300 Frenchtown Road, East Greenwich, RI 02818
Steam & Compressed Air for Models.
Licensed Boilers & Licensed Engineers.
New Englands Largest Steam-Up Boiler.
Giant Working Steam Engines & Hot Air & IC.

Admission is $15.00 for adults, children under 12 are $5.00. All Steam-Up proceeds go to upkeep of the museum. Parking is free, and there is food at the event.

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We just wrote about a grandmother getting arrested for buying cold medicine, without realizing a state limit on how much pseudoephedrine could be bought in a single week. Even though everyone involved admits that this grandmother wasn't in the meth making business, the police still felt the need to go ahead with the arrest. In the comments, one of our readers, BobInBaltimore, noted that a big part of the problem is the fact that we've pretty much done away with the concept of "intent to commit a crime" as being a prerequisite for establishing criminality.

Indeed, the WSJ just had an opinion piece all about the how modern technology has made accidental criminals out of all of us, based on the new book Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent. As you can probably guess, the thesis of the book is that modern technology, combined with an increasingly confusing, misunderstood or just downright ridiculous set of laws, means that everyone is committing felonies all the time, entirely without meaning to do so. In the opinion piece, it's argued that we really need to bring back the "intent to commit a crime" requirement, as it would put an end to a lot of these arrests. It makes a lot of sense, which is why it'll probably never happen.

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Barence writes "Microsoft has started certifying PCs as 'compatible with Windows 7' — and is looking to avoid the mistakes that dogged the Vista-Capable scheme. Whereas Microsoft certified PCs that could only run Vista Home Basic last time around, this time PCs will have to work with all versions of Windows 7 to qualify for the sticker, including 64-bit versions of the OS. Microsoft also claims, 'products that receive the logo are checked for common issues to minimize the number of crashes, hangs, and reboots experienced by the user.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.