MyOpenRouter writes "Netgear has announced the WNR3500L, a brand new, open source, wireless-N gigabit router is customizable with third party firmwares. MyOpenRouter is the dedicated source for Netgear open source routers, with the full scoop including a review with screenshots, how-to's, tutorials, firmware downloads, etc. Here's a review and the downloads page." The router can run popular open source firmware including DD-WRT, OpenWRT. and Tomato. It will list for $140.

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Several users wrote to tell us that Dow Chemical plans on selling solar shingles as early as next year. The solar version can be integrated with normal asphalt shingling and will be introduced in 2010 with a wider roll-out scheduled for 2011. "The shingle will use thin-film cells of copper indium gallium diselenide (CIGS), a photovoltaic material that typically is more efficient at turning sunlight into electricity than traditional polysilicon cells. Dow is using CIGS cells that operate at higher than 10 percent efficiency, below the efficiencies for the top polysilicon cells -- but would cost 10 to 15 percent less on a per watt basis."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Several users wrote to tell us that Dow Chemical plans on selling solar shingles as early as next year. The solar version can be integrated with normal asphalt shingling and will be introduced in 2010 with a wider roll-out scheduled for 2011. "The shingle will use thin-film cells of copper indium gallium diselenide (CIGS), a photovoltaic material that typically is more efficient at turning sunlight into electricity than traditional polysilicon cells. Dow is using CIGS cells that operate at higher than 10 percent efficiency, below the efficiencies for the top polysilicon cells -- but would cost 10 to 15 percent less on a per watt basis."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I have to admit that I started to read Randall Stross' latest article at the NY Times over the weekend -- Will Piracy Become a Problem for E-Books? -- but originally stopped a couple paragraphs in. It struck me as the laziest of lazy reporting tricks by Stross. It's a trend piece without a trend, basically pure filler. However, we keep getting submissions with pleas to debunk some of the more ridiculous claims in the article... so, we'll take a quick crack. The main problem is that it uses the recording industry as an example -- with bogus and/or misleading recording industry data, citing both the RIAA and the IFPI in stating that "piracy" has been a problem for the music industry. Tragically, there is no actual evidence to support those claims. Piracy has coincided with the decline in sales of recorded music, but the causal link has not been shown. In fact, we've pointed to numerous studies that showed those who file share tend to buy more music than in the past. But, more importantly, recent studies have shown that while recorded music sales have gone down, the overall music industry has grown.

All that's really happened is that technology has resulted in a shift in how the dollars are spent: more goes towards live shows and merchandise than in the past and less on recorded music. The end result, though? More money being spent on music overall and more money for musicians. The only ones who have less money? The middlemen an the record labels who were too slow to update their business models once it became obvious which way this trend was going. Claiming that the numbers from the recording industry show the "harm" done by piracy is like claiming that the numbers from the Horse Carriage Association of America show how automobiles killed transportation. Recorded music does not represent "the music industry" just as horse carriages did not represent the transportation industry.

And, of course, it's worth looking at how such "piracy" impacts other parts of the industry. In one recent study done at Harvard, if you add in the sales of digital music players, such as the iPod, the music ecosystem has grown tremendously. In fact, that's part of the reason we've argued in the past that the ebook industry, if anything, really could use more piracy, not less, because it would help drive the overall market forward, and more quickly open up new business models. Fearing piracy is a fool's game. Getting more information out to more people more quickly only opens up opportunity.

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reebmmm writes "The Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF) and Intel have settled their patent suit over technology developed by Gurindar Sohi, a computer science professor at the University of Wisconsin — Madison. Professor Sohi developed technology that was ultimately patented by WARF using money he received from Intel. Last month, Judge Barbara Crabb found that the funding agreement was ambiguous, but that e-mails revealed that the money was an unrestricted gift and carried with it no obligation to license or assign any inventions to Intel. Trial was scheduled to begin today. The terms of the settlement were not disclosed."

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We recently reported on anti-video game crusader Jack Thompson's lawsuit against Facebook, which suggested an unfamiliarity with Section 230 safe harbors. But, it gets worse. The website GamePolitics, who is listed in Thompson's lawsuit as being a key player in "orchestrating" libel attacks on Thompson, spoke to Thompson about the lawsuit, and in the course of the phone call, the GamePolitics reporter, Andrew Eisen, noted that every Facebook Group had a little link that allowed anyone to report the group for abuse, with a promise of action in 24 hours. He asked Thompson if he had clicked the link, to which Thompson called him a "total moron." Eisen, though, is apparently craftier than Thompson took him for, and clicked the link on one of the groups that Thompson was complaining about. What happened? Less than a day later? That group is gone from Facebook. Aren't there rules in filing lawsuits where you're supposed to take actions to mitigate the harm? In the meantime, it looks like Thompson owes Eisen and GamePolitics at least a thank you...

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Engadget has snagged some of the details behind a bunch of multi-touch mouse prototypes from Microsoft Research. The prototypes range from the wacky to the extreme, but at least they are thinking outside the mouse trap. "Each one uses a different touch detection method, and at first glance all five seem to fly in the face of regular ergonomics. The craziest two are probably "Arty," which has two articulated arms to cradle your thumb and index finger, with each pad housing its own optical sensor for mission-critical pinching gestures, and "Side Mouse" which is button free and actually detects finger touches in the table immediately in front of the palm rest. Of course, there's plenty of crazy in the FTIR, Orb Mouse and Cap Mouse (pictured), which rely on an internal camera, orb-housed IR camera and capacitive detection, respectively. Of course, there's no word on when these might actually see the light of day"

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Hungry for breakfast? Forget fast food, try following your childhood dreams and build a breakfast machine to make it for you! I'll do it as soon as I can convince someone to clean it for me; anyone looking for an internship?

The jam rolling unit really caught my eye. What would it take to turn that into a rotary diecutter? I'd love to have toast spelled out in my initials.

[via neatorama]

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flogger writes "I have been asked to help develop a literature course for Science Fiction and Fantasy literature. What do you consider to be appropriate selections of short stories and novels in these genres for high school students of all ability levels? I'd also like to know why you choose certain selections. This class will be 'regular' class and not a class for 'flunkies' to earn a credit by sitting docile and listening to lectures. The following is a course description that I have been given as a guideline. This description can change. Any ideas? 'In this Junior/Senior level course, students will focus on the genres of Science Fiction and Fantasy. Students will survey the histories of these genres and recognize how world events have been reflected onto other worlds. From the early formation of the genre, with Verne, and the classics of Clarke, Tolkien, Bradbury, and LeGuin, to the contemporary works of Card, Jordan, and Vinge, the genres have been about portraying humanity in possible scenarios. These works have mirrored events throughout the troubled situations of our history and provided optimistic outcomes and horrifying predictions. Through this course, students will utilize analytical skills and reading strategies to evaluate our current situation and project into the literature of different worlds while sharing and learning of an author's insight. Possible areas of interest will be topics of the environment, energy conservation, war, social issues, and others. '"

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Ah, the glorious trademark dispute. Apparently Apple is quite upset at Woolworths, the Australia and New Zealand supermarket chain (apparently not connected to the now defunct chain in the US, though that is where the name came from), because the Woolworths down under has decided to use a logo with a stylized W made to sorta, kinda, maybe if you squint and shake your head rapidly look like Apple's apple logo, but not really: Honestly, I have no idea how anyone can claim the two logos are similar in a way that might lead to even the slightest bit of confusion. The claim from Apple is that its concern is that Woolworths wants the mark to potentially include electronics and technology, should it decide to sell those. But, even so, no one would confuse these two. No one would think that there's any likelihood of one endorsing the other even slightly.

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The Howard Phillips Lovecraft Historical Society, whose work I dearly love and have written about before, is compiling a complete prop edition of the Necronomicon from reader submissions! There was, apparently, a "Necronomicontest" of some sort to encourage submissions, the deadline of which has now passed, but they are still accepting "mad ramblings" here.

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Here's a vid of an OLPC OX that runs a RepRep which is printing out little camera viewfinders for the XO, to help kids line up shots with the laptop's built-in camera.

The OLPC OX and 3D Printing

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TechReviewAl writes "Researchers at the University of California at Santa Barbara hijacked the Mebroot botnet for about a month and used it to study drive-by downloading. The researchers managed to intercept Mebroot communications by reverse-engineering the algorithm used to select domains to connect to. Mebroot infects legitimate websites and uses them to redirect users to malicious sites that attempt to install malware on a victim's machine. The team, who previously infiltrated the Torpig botnet, found that at least 13.3 percent of systems that were redirected by Mebroot were already infected and 70 percent were vulnerable to about 40 common attacks."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Dorkbot NYC is this Wednesday!

Featuring the pale green and salt-forming:

Torino:Margolis is a performance art team that crosses physical and psychological barriers, using invasive electronics and biomedical tools. They explore the idea that the self is transient, elusive and modular by playing with the notion of control and free will. In their new media/dance piece, Action Potential, they harvest a dancer's neuronal impulses using electromyography machines. Using Arduino and XBees, the signals are sent wirelessly to Pure Data open source software, which transforms the signals into sound. Sound/programming by Lee Azzarello and choreography by Dana Kotler.

Stefani Bardin: Chemical Proust: Remembrance of Things Pastiche I'm a media maker interested in the intersections of food, technology and science. By examining industrial food production alongside the media rich stylized presentation of food and using such tools as artificial smells (that "flavor" our food supply) and gastroenterology technology I look at food as both a mediating agent and phenomenological reference point within our society and how its role has changed through the modern influences of technology and corporate culture.

Lee von Kraus: cyborgs and cybernetics I will discuss the roborat, roboroach, and other cybernetics stuff I'm working on. The roborat is a rat that is trained to move in directions specified by electronic signals sent to its brain via electrodes. The roboroach is a cockroach that is tricked into moving in specified directions by using mechanically actuated antenna stimulation. The 'other cybernetics stuff' refers to a goal of augmenting brains via induction of new circuit formation.

What: dorkbot-nyc meeting

When: 7-9pm, 07 Oct 2009

Where: Location One, 20 Green Street, north of Canal

$$$: $$$FREE$$$

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I love this funky robotic arm that looks like it's something from the set of Terry Gilliam's Brazil. The arm is constructed of techno-junk, recycled PCB material, cassette motors, 15-gauge wire, fishing line. The "brains" for the arm is a 6502 CPU from the 1980s. Tres retro!

While you're on the site, check out some of the builders other ingenious BEAM-ish bots. [Thanks, R. Mark Adams!]

The Robot Arm

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Mesanna alerts us to a blog post from the wife/manager of pop singer Edwyn Collins discussing the hellish experience she's gone through trying to offer up Collins' most famous song, A Girl Like You, on MySpace. Collins owns the copyright and wants the music to be freely downloadable by anyone, but Warner Music claimed that it owns the copyright, even though it does not:

At the beginning of this year I noticed that Edwyn's myspace had gone bit wonky and I tried to upload the tracks back on to the music player. His most famous track, which he owns the copyright in, as he does for most of the music he's recorded in his life (preferring to go it alone than have his music trapped "in perpetuity" to use the contract language of the major record company) is called A Girl Like You. It's quite famous. Lo and behold, it would not upload, I was told Edwyn was attempting to breach a copyright and he was sent to the Orwellian myspace copyright re-education page. Quite chilling, actually. I naturally blew my stack and wrote to myspace on his behalf demanding to know who the hell was claiming copyright of Edwyn's track? Which, incidentally, he always made freely available for download on myspace, something which amazed his followers. Eventually, after HUGE difficulty, I was told Warner Music Group were claiming it. I found a nice lawyer guy at Warners, very apologetic, promised to get it sorted, but all these months later it isn't. That is because Myspace are not equipped to deal with the notion that anyone other than a major can claim a copyright. Warner's were one of the lead petitioners in the attempt to put those three stoner lads in Sweden in prison recently, remember.

Meanwhile, the song which Collins wants to give away, but cannot, is being sold all over the internet... but not by Collins. Instead, it's by major labels who have no right to do so, according to Collins' manager:

A Girl Like You is available FOR SALE all over the internet. Not by Edwyn, by all sorts of respectable major labels whose licence to sell it ran out years ago and who do not account to him. Attempting to make them cease and desist would use up the rest of my life. Because this is what they do and what they've always done.

Wait... major labels... selling a song they don't have the right to, and not giving any of the money back to the artist? That seems a hell of a lot worse than just sharing a song for non-commercial reasons, doesn't it?

Meanwhile, Collins has no problem with the sharing of bootlegs:

Andrew Loog Oldham said that getting ripped off (by the industry) was your entrance fee to the music business of the sixties, so get over it. He's right and things have not changed. We are very over it, but nonetheless aware of who the biggest bootleggers around are. It's not the filesharers. Personally, we've always loved bootlegs. Even when Edwyn was really skint at the fag end of the eighties, I remember being in Camden market and seeing some tapes of a couple of his shows on sale. I tried to buy them but the stallholder somehow knew who I was and said "free to the management." I failed to see how that guy selling tapes of Edwyn or even U2 or anybody on the list of signatories above could harm their career.

And... then at the end, she's got a nice little message for the Featured Artist Coalition and its silly petition to try to stop file sharing:

The gig's up. You might as well take a position about when you want the sun to come up in the morning. It's over. Now let's get on with working out a wonderful new way for music lovers to enjoy music for free or for a small subscription that makes it legal and easy to hear ANYTHING and allows the artist to reap the rewards of such freedom of access. Viva la revolucion!

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stoolpigeon writes "Rich Internet Applications (RIA) have often been associated with some type of sandbox or virtual machine environment to make desktop features available via the web. Many applications though, have left behind the restrictions and demands of those technologies, implementing RIAs as pure web interfaces. One key technology in this area is JavaScript. It's been well documented that working with JavaScript can be problematic across various browsers. In response a number of JavaScript libraries have been created to alleviate the issues in dealing with different browsers, allowing developers to focus on application logic rather than platform concerns. One such library, focused on providing tools for building RIAs is Ext JS. For the aspiring developer looking to use Ext JS, Packt provides a guide to the library in the form of Learning Ext JS." Read on for the rest of JR's review.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The British Psychological Society asked world's leading psychologists to reveal one nagging thing they still don't understand about themselves. Their answers (in 150 words or less) are a lot of fun to read.

Sue Blackmore says she is still fooled by the idea that she has a "soul, a spirit, a mystical entity."

Paul Broks has gone from asking himself the "preoccupying question, What am I? to another, What should I do?"

David Buss is surprised that he succumbs to "well-documented psychological biases, even though I’m acutely aware of these biases," such as "believing that I will be happy for a long time after some accomplishment (e.g. publishing a new book), when in fact the happiness dissipates more quickly than anticipated."

Robert Cialdini says his "most nagging error" is overcommitting. "With that threshold crossed, I've no longer had the time or patience to plan, think, or toil hard enough to be proud of the resultant work."

Stephen Kosslyn asks, "Why am I a Satiator in some cases, and an Addict in others?"

Paul Rozin says, "Every night, I bring home a pile of work to do in the evening and early morning. I have been doing this for over 50 years. I always think I will actually get through all or most of it, and I almost never get even half done. But I keep expecting to accomplish it all. What a fool I am."

Norbert Schwarz says incidental feelings still affect him, even though he is aware of them. "Some 25 years ago Jerry Clore and I studied how gloomy weather makes one’s whole life look bad -- unless one becomes aware of the weather and attributes one’s gloomy mood to the gloomy sky, which eliminates the influence. You’d think I learned that lesson and now know how to deal with gloomy skies. I don’t, they still get me."

The other answers are equally fascinating.

One nagging thing you still don't understand about yourself (Via Mind Hacks)

Here's a neat sound sculpture made by The Books. The spoons are animated by playing sounds on a speaker mounted behind them. This works because sound waves are basically traveling pressure differences. When the sound wave hits the spoon with more pressure than the atmospheric pressure of the room on the other side, the spoon gets sucked outward. You can try this by yourself if you have a subwoofer with a small opening- just stick a piece of paper over it.

It seems like it would be an interesting challenge to compose music for, because the sound and spoon movement are tightly coupled. I wonder if you could use this principle ot create a feedback-based drum machine?

[via boingboing]

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TechReviewAl writes "Former astronaut Franklin Chang Diaz believes that the private sector can revitalize NASA, and his company is developing a plasma rocket to back up that claim. Chang Diaz argues that private industry can be used to develop much of the basic technology needed for space exploration, allowing NASA to focus on more sophisticated and critical components. His company, Ad Astra, is developing a variable specific impulse magnetoplasma rocket (VASIMR) that will be used to reposition the International Space Station. Last week, the rocket passed an important milestone in testing — reaching 200 kilowatts (enough to move the ISS). A video of the rocket can be seen on Ad Astra's site."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

TechReviewAl writes "Former astronaut Franklin Chang Diaz believes that the private sector can revitalize NASA, and his company is developing a plasma rocket to back up that claim. Chang Diaz argues that private industry can be used to develop much of the basic technology needed for space exploration, allowing NASA to focus on more sophisticated and critical components. His company, Ad Astra's is developed a variable specific impulse magnetoplasma rocket (VASIMR) that will be used to reposition the International Space Station. Last week, the rocket passed an important milestone in testing — reaching 200-kilowatts (enough to move the ISS). A video of the rocket can be seen on Ad Astra's site."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Last year, The Onion (which has a knack for predicting the future in really scary ways) had an amusing article: Recession-Plagued Nation Demands New Bubble To Invest In. In the immortal words of Homer Simpson: "It's funny 'cause it's true." And, indeed, one of the big fears we've had since the beginning of the government's response to the financial crisis is that it hasn't been doing anything to solve the real problem of a lack of transparency. Pumping more money into the system without fixing that simply meant that we'd repeat the cycle, with the money eventually finding some bubble again.

At this point, it's worth taking a step back, and understanding why these sorts of bubbles occur. Sometimes, investment bubbles can actually be quite beneficial. In markets of true innovation, where a clear success story or business model hasn't yet been worked out, a bubble allows a lot of money to be thrown at the problem at once. From that, you get a lot of ideas tested in the marketplace very rapidly. Many of them fail once the bubble collapses, and many investors lose money, but the ideas that do work and do stick around tend to takes us forward in leaps and bounds. Bubbles in innovative technologies function as a form of speeding up the innovation process and getting lots of infrastructure built and ideas tested rapidly. It's no fun if you're caught on the wrong side of the investment, but for society, it can be a net gain.

However, that's not what happened in the last economic crash. That was built on a different sort of bubble, based not on funding innovation, but on a series of arbitrage plays where bankers actively worked to obfuscate risk, so that it could be passed on to the latest sucker. Basically, they kept taking riskier and riskier assets, and packaged them in a way that they looked less risky. Then, by making it so no one could really look at (or understand) the true risk, they could sell these super risky investments off to suckers at prices as if they were safe. And, since such a house of cards takes a while to collapse, it doesn't take long for everyone to pile in, feeling like they have to match those returns.

So, the answer to this is to increase transparency. If you could really get the information out there, such that people could look at the underlying details and properly calculate the risk, not based on random clueless rating agency employees, but in a true market, then it would be that much more difficult to pass off and misprice super risky vehicles as safe.

But that's not what's happening. Without any efforts at increasing transparency, combined with pumping a ton of new cash into the market, we're getting another bubble. The bankers are still operating the same way they did in the past -- which is looking for ways to obfuscate the risk and find new suckers to take the risk off their hands without really understanding how to price that risk. It may be securitizing life insurance or it may be in the carry trade. It doesn't really matter. The money is looking for a new bubble and a focus on short term profits over long term sustainability -- and that's enabled by allowing banks to play "hide the risk."

This is really quite worrisome. It's been over a year since the financial crisis went into panic mode (even if the actual recession and problems significantly predated that). And while the "worst case scenario" did not occur, there's been little evidence of real fixes to the economy or any attempt to really fix the factors that resulted in the original problem. Instead of creating transparency and a long term strategic focus, we're just pumping cash into the economy to try to help suckers find the next bubble.

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Prolific blogger and open source enthusiast Matt Asay ponders whether cloud computing may be the Hotel California of tech. It seems that data repositories in the form of Googles and Facebooks are very easy to dump data into, but can be quite difficult to move data between. "I say this because even for companies, like Google, that articulate open-data policies, the cloud is still largely a one-way road into Web services, with closed data networks making it difficult to impossible to move data into competing services. Ever tried getting your Facebook data into, say, MySpace? Good luck with that. Social networks aren't very social with one other, as recently noted on the Atonomo.us mailing list. For the freedom-inclined among us, this is cause for concern. For the capitalists, it's just like Software 1.0 all over again, with fat profits waiting to be had. The great irony, of course, is that it's all built with open source."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Back in 2005, I wrote a fictional scientific paper (.pdf) postulating that zombiism is in fact caused by a prion, rather than a virus, as is commonly hypothesized. I also wrote a short essay about the idea of "fiction science" at the time. Now Ben Tippet, at the behest of Dinosaur Comics' Ryan North, has written a similarly fictional scientific paper (.pdf) presenting "A Unified Theory of Superman's Powers" from a physicist's perspective. I'd be interested in hearing of other examples of people co-opting the serious literary forms of science for fictional purposes. If you know of one, please drop me a comment. [via Neatorama]

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An anonymous reader writes to tell us that in the first revision of how endorsements and testimonials work since 1980, bloggers will now be required by the FTC to clearly disclose freebies or payments they received for product reviews. "the commission stopped short Monday of specifying how bloggers must disclose any conflicts of interest. The FTC said its commissioners voted 4-0 to approve the final guidelines, which had been expected. Penalties include up to $11,000 in fines per violation. The rules take effect Dec. 1."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

We had just been discussing how the US Chamber of Commerce (currently losing some big name members for its troubling connection to reality on certain topics) was misinterpreting some stats about patent laws to push for stronger protectionism, and along comes an opinion piece by Mark Esper, the Chamber of Commerce's executive VP of its "Global Intellectual Property Center." Take a wild guess what he argues for? You got it! Stronger intellectual property all around. The problem is that the editorial is riddled with factual and logical errors that aren't just sloppy, but are almost laughable.

The legal rights that governed IP for generations provided a known system of incentives that both fostered and spread innovation. It was the inducements built into our free-enterprise system, coupled with the talents and hard work of entrepreneurs, which moved this nation forward. It worked back then, and it will work now.

This is actually entirely unsupported by the evidence. Studies have shown -- repeatedly -- that no causal relationship has been shown between IP rights and innovation. Furthermore, it's pretty laughable to pick a gov't granted monopoly and claim that this is an "inducement built into a free-enterprise system." IP is the opposite of free enterprise. It's a gov't-granted monopoly. Also, in the paragraph above, he's talking about IP post World War II. What he skips over is that after that period, both patent law and copyright law were greatly expanded, such that they barely resemble what was seen following WWII (especially copyrights).

Six decades later, nearly half the U.S. economy is driven by industries that depend heavily on intellectual property rights. If we are to jumpstart a second economic renaissance, then we must begin by protecting and stimulating the lifeblood of America's economy: its ideas.

Well, beyond the lack of evidence that IP stimulates ideas, every time we talk about IP stifling ideas, IP system defenders rush onto this blog to remind us that neither copyright nor patents are supposed to protect "ideas," but rather "expressions" or "inventions." Someone should inform Esper of this.

The counterfeiting and piracy of American goods cost the U.S. economy over $200 billion annually, and the loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs. This growing problem, coupled with the fact that some foreign governments are working to weaken IP laws that protect American patents, threatens to slow down innovation by undermining the incentives that foster it.

Where to start? Well, how about that $200 billion number? It's made up. Almost entirely. Both the GAO and the OECD looked into the numbers bandied about by the Chamber of Commerce and other lobbying groups and found (oops) that they were exaggerated, sometimes by an order of magnitude or more.

As for the claim that "foreign governments" are trying to "weaken IP laws?" Again, totally made up. Around the globe, almost all of the efforts have been for strengthening, not weakening IP laws. And, again, studies have shown that stronger IP laws do not correlate to greater innovation, and often the reverse.

This is occurring at a time when industries that rely on IP, such as pharmaceuticals, IT, and entertainment, employ 18 million Americans, and are expected to exceed the national average when it comes to future job growth. At the same time, workers in IP-based industries are projected to earn approximately $7,000 more than their counterparts in non-IP lines of work.

This assumes, entirely incorrectly, that those jobs don't exist in the absence of IP. Unfortunately, the evidence is again totally against Esper. Countries that had no patents on pharma goods, such as India and Italy for many years, still had incredibly thriving pharmaceutical industries. In fact, Italy's pharma industry shrunk after it put in place patents for pharma. So, the idea that stronger patents are needed to protect jobs? There doesn't seem to be any support for that.

In short, America's future depends on intellectual property

See, this is a neat trick. He's assuming that all intellectual output relies on IP laws. That's not true. America's future may depend on innovation, but that's not the same as saying it depends on stronger IP laws.

Our IP is valued at over $5 trillion -- more than the GDP of any other country. Intellectual property also accounts for more than half of all U.S. exports, helping drive 40 percent of U.S. economic growth. In 2006 alone, IP exports contributed $37 billion to our trade balance, demonstrating the power of IP in the global marketplace.

Ah, the use of funny math. Again, this involves some number games, whereby lots of things that have absolutely nothing to do with patent, trademark or copyright law are "counted" as being included in these numbers. The fact that much of it would have happened anyway, even with no such laws, is totally ignored.

In every state in the union, IP has played an integral role in molding the economy. Take President Obama's home state of Illinois, for instance. Illinois is ranked sixth in the nation for patents, and creative industries have contributed to over $1 billion in local wages. It is home to 144 university-based and 71 federal research centers, and features eight premier research and technology parks that grow the high-tech companies and jobs of the future.

Nice job pandering to the President. Of course, again, note the implicit (but false) assumption, that it's IP laws that are entirely responsible for this output. Note the implicit (but false) assumption that the research coming out of those universities and research centers are due to IP laws.

Intellectual property is woven into the fabric of our lives and the nation's economy, and has played a critical role in all the major advancements that have made the 20th century one of the most defining times in human history. It is the author of great American moments, from the Apollo program and the PC, to the Internet and iPods, and all the great songs, stories and movies in between that have shaped our culture.

Again, falsely attributing all of those to IP laws. Amusingly, of course, the internet had almost nothing to do with IP laws, and the only time IP has become involved in internet infrastructure, it's been to hold back innovations. And iPods? The thing (well, its predecessor, the Diamond Rio) that the recording industry tried to sue out of existence using IP laws? Yeah, that's not a very strong argument to put forth. The PC's success was actually based on the fact that much of it was built upon open standards and widely shared and copied technology, rather than being locked down by IP laws. The Apollo program I'm less familiar with from an IP standpoint, but seeing as it was a gov't program put forth due to a challenge from President Kennedy and funded by the US gov't, there's is no indication that it required patents as incentive for that particular innovation...

We cannot take IP rights for granted. Rather, we must strengthen IP enforcement and continue promoting innovation and creativity, and the laws that protect both. The next economic renaissance needs to happen now, and strong IP rights will help usher in this new era of job growth and economic revitalization.

Stunning. Right after naming a bunch of innovations that happened because of looser IP restrictions, you suddenly insist that we need stronger IP enforcement? Have you no shame?

I haven't paid much attention to the US Chamber of Commerce, but does anyone actually take them seriously when they spew nonsense like this?

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Watch Raphael Abrams teach a Japanese TV host how to build the Twitchie robot kit, among other things, at NYC Resistor in this adorable video in two parts.

More:

Twitchie Scorpion

In the Maker Shed:

Twitchie Robot Kit

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Last night I finally scraped together the 2 hours to watch the premiere of Stargate Universe. Since the last two series' really ran their course and deserved to end, I was skeptical. Although at first blush it appears that the show is just Atlantis + Voyager shot in the documentary style that practically every sci-fi show since Firefly uses. But I enjoyed it, and figured we should have a place to discuss it. The TV Landscape needs more real, good sci-fi: there's not a lot of it left, even on the moronically renamed Syfy channel. But maybe this one will have a solid season. I just hope that future episodes don't have so many commercials. I couldn't believe how many ads appeared during this thing.

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nk497 writes "Steve Ballmer has admitted Microsoft's licensing is too complicated and contains too much fine print, but has no plans to change it at the risk of angering shareholders — and even customers who benefit from the confusion. "I'm sure we have fine print we don't need. We're not saints," he said, adding that customers have a way of figuring out how to pay the least amount of cash possible to use Microsoft's software. "Customers always find an approach which pays us less money.""

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Bloody good post (sorry) over on Mental Floss collecting some delightful home furnishings from the Lady MacBeth collection. Just don't think you can get away with leaving them out past Halloween. The world's not ready yet. [via Neatorama]

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Suw Charman, of Ada Lovelace Day fame, sez,

Film maker Rosemarie Reed has been in touch with me about a film she's planning called Byron and Babbage: A Calculating Story. Based on Ada Lovelace's letters, it will be a feature-length documentary with some dramatic readings and will air on PBS National.

Rosemarie needs to gather letters of support from the community - from people who feel that Ada is an important figure.

Rosemarie says, "I need letters from people stating how important a film like Ada is and how they through their networks can help to publicize the film. It would be great if the women have organizations they work or belong to. If they are software developers or computer experts, this would be great. It would be best if they were Americans, as the NSF (National Science Foundation) is American."

Letters should be sent by the end of October to:

Rosemarie Reed
On the Road Productions International, Inc.
310 Greenwich Street, 21F
New York, NY 10013

Byron and Babbage: A Calculating Story (Thanks, Suw!)

There have been a bunch of studies recently claiming that multi-tasking and our constant use of technology harms our ability to concentrate or accomplish certain tasks. A recent example is a study claiming that so much tech usage is harming our ability to learn because kids can't focus as much on long form work. Of course, I'm a bit skeptical of any such claims (almost all anecdotal) considering that actual studies have shown that kids read more books today than in the past. And, it's not just kids. More people are reading books than in the past in the general population as well.

Still, there's another argument to be made also, which reader JJ recently pointed out. Stowe Boyd notes that all of these types of studies miss the point, in that personal efficiency may be less important than being more interactive:

Perhaps what we are doing has nothing to do with efficiency. I don't operate the way I do with the principal goal of speeding things up. My motivations are much more complex and diffused.

I don't perceive what I am doing as multitasking, really. I am not trying to speed up how quickly I shift from one thing to another. Instead, I am involved in a stream of activities, in which other people figure prominently, either synchronously through direct discussion (a la Twitter or IM) or indirectly, through their writings and my responses.

In many cases, I leave activities dangling because I don't know exactly how I feel about them. In some cases, I could resolve my feelings and take some action if I simply stopped other activities and focused solely on that activity, but in most cases that is not the case. And simply forcing myself to focus on the next thing in the activity would not lead to an acceptable or beneficial result, necessarily.

It's like a painter with a number of works in process. My primary motivation is not getting a particular painting 'done', but adding dabs of paint that I feel are the right ones.

I honestly had never thought of it this way, and I'll admit I'm not sure how I feel on this. But it is an interesting way of looking at such things. Obviously, in a work setting, personal productivity may matter. But, in general -- just doing stuff online -- is it a problem that we multitask? Or is that a feature?

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cheros was one of several readers to note that today, Oct 5, in 1969 was the very first airing of Monty Python. Although not every sketch has aged particularly well, you'd be hard pressed to find a more influential and funny show. Heck, look at the Icon we use here to indicate humorous stories! Who among us can't claim to have viewed the Holy Grail at least somewhere in the double digits.

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I'm really digging all the manly knotwork going on over at Stormdrane's blog.

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An anonymous reader writes This year's Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine is awarded to three scientists who have solved a major problem in biology: how the chromosomes can be copied in a complete way during cell divisions and how they are protected against degradation. The Nobel Laureates have shown that the solution is to be found in the ends of the chromosomes, called the telomeres, and in an enzyme that forms them."

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Circuit-bending/music machine-building maestro Gijs Gieskes has posted the details of his latest creation, a synth that uses the SEGA video RAM as an audio source (after it's been slowed down via a binary counter).

Check out his use of magnetic patch bays to switch up the sounds. His tutorial on how to make the patch cords can be found here.

Video Ram Synth 1

More:
Make: Online's coverage of Gijs Gieskes' instruments

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Last week, soon after the news broke that David Letterman had confessed, on air, to a variety of affairs with staffers, following a blackmail attempt about those affairs, Peter Kafka over at AllthingsD pointed to a YouTube video of the 10 minute revelation, noting that he expected CBS to be playing wac-a-mole in trying to force all of the clips offline. And, indeed, that's exactly what's happening. CBS has apparently been sending takedown after takedown to YouTube to get the clip offline. This is odd for a few reasons. First, CBS is actually one of the few TV networks to actually like YouTube, and use it regularly to its own advantage. Way back in 2006, the company announced that tests showed that when it put clips on YouTube, it resulted in more viewership, not less.

So why take down all these clips?

The anonymously sourced explanation in the article is just that there was a request from Letterman's production company to CBS not to put that clip online. I can see why that request was made in the first place (who wants that embarrassing clip up there...) but it still doesn't make much sense once you think about it. If Letterman didn't want that video out there, then why discuss it at all on the show? The show went out to millions of people. It's pretty silly to then pretend it doesn't exist at all. All it really does is call that much more attention to the situation. Meanwhile, the clips keep going up, and employees at both CBS and YouTube have to waste a ton of time repeatedly taking them down... And, in the end, the clips will end up on other sites anyway. If anyone wants to see the Letterman explanation, they'll see it. So why not put it up on the official CBS/Letterman feed and deal with it that way?

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An anonymous reader writes 'Thousands of recent computer purchasers who are expecting to receive free upgrades to Windows 7 when it is released on October 22 may be surprised to learn that some big computer makers are quietly tacking on hefty processing fees as high as $17 to mail out those disks to some buyers.' How about they process $0 to click a link and download a file?

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An anonymous reader writes 'Thousands of recent computer purchasers who are expecting to receive free upgrades to Windows 7 when it is released on October 22 may be surprised to learn that some big computer makers are quietly tacking on hefty processing fees as high as $17 to mail out those disks to some buyers.' How about they process $0 to click a link and download a file?

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pickens writes "The asteroid that impacted earth 65 million years ago killed off dinosaurs, but microalgae bounced back from the global extinction in about 100 years or less. Julio Sepúlveda, a geochemist at MIT, studied the molecular remains of microorganisms by extracting organic residues from rocks dated to the K-T extinction (in this research referred to as Cretaceous-Paleogene), and his results show that the ocean algae community greatly shrunk in size but only for about a century. 'We found that primary production in this part of the ocean recovered extremely rapidly after the impact,' says Julio Sepúlveda. Algae leave certain signatures of organic compounds and isotopes of carbon and nitrogen; bacteria leave different signatures. In the earliest layers after the asteroid impact, the researchers found much evidence for bacteria but little for algae, suggesting that right after the impact, algae production was greatly reduced. But the chemical signs of algae start to increase immediately above this layer. A full recovery of the ocean ecosystem probably took about a million years, but the quick rebound of photosynthesizing algae seems to confirm models that suggest the impact delivered a swift, abrupt blow to the Earth's environment."

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The fine folks over at Core77 have a bunch of pictures from the launch of the Oregon Manifest Constructor's Design Challenge. The top 12 designs will be on display for the duration of the event.

We're looking for the next-wave transportation bike! OREGON MANIFEST has challenged frame builders from around the country to design and build an innovative, modern transportation bike in this technical trial of engineering dexterity and fabrication mettle.

Over 30 custom bike builders will be developing considered, integrated, and spectacular solutions for the everyday rider. The top 12 winners will be displayed at the OM Bike Union for our full 6 weekend run!

[via Core77]

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Devin just submitted this video to our Make: Halloween Contest 2009. It's a Tesla coil activated by a relay controlled by a microcontroller with a motion sensor. As Devin says, the coil is "very loud and startling," and he intends to use it in a haunted house. He's written an Instructable, too. Zap!

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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In the first half of this decade, the press liked to cheer on those hedge fund bosses, who abused the financial system to great wealth. These days, of course, with the economy in the tank, the press needs to find some other class of system-abusers to cheer on. As Copycense notes, it looks like DC lobbyists may be getting the celebrity treatment these days, similar to the hedge fund batch a few years ago. It's as if the press gleefully looks for those who abuse the system for greed to celebrate. What a shame.

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Ricoh has posted a firmware update for its CX2 digital compact camera. Version 1.13 fixes minor issues related to manual focus and step zoom. The firmware is available for immediate download from Ricoh's website.

More paracord goodness from Stormdrane.

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This wooden hand crank iPhone dock automata by Murtaza Lakdawala is equal parts form and function. Turn the crank and watch the gears mesh as the automata changes the iPhone's orientation from portrait to landscape.

[via Gizmodo]

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identity0 writes "A recent Slashdot discussion about heart-rate monitors in schools got me thinking about getting one for my own exercise. It turns out that the available models have a wide range of features: calorie rate, pedometers, GPS, PC connectivity, etc. Being a geek, I want one that will let me look at my exercise data, and I'm curious what experiences Slashdotters have had with them. Some download data to a proprietary application — are open source alternatives available or is the data format easily readable? Others upload data to an online app — can the data be pulled off the site or is it forever trapped on their servers? While I'm not an open source zealot or a paranoid about my data being shared, I would like to know that I can access my data in the future. Whatever method you guys use to monitor your exercise, I'd love to hear about it."

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sams67 writes "Australian supermarket Woolworth is on the receiving end of an action from Apple over Woolworth's new logo. The green, highly stylized 'W' logo could at best be described as 'apple-like.' As outlined in the article, Apple is taking similar action in Australia against music festival promoter, Poison Apple, and pay TV provider Foxtel, over their fruit-related logos."

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Rogue archivist Carl Malamud sez,

Well, this is just very cool. I throw a few stones over the wall to official DC, but this time I want to send some roses in the front door.

The Government Printing Office and the Office of the Federal Register just announced they're making all the "Official Journals of Government" available for free in bulk. Previous price was $17,000/year per product.

But wait, there's more. They've upgraded the Federal Register to XML. And, believe it or not, GPO has been using Ed Felten's shop at Princeton (coming Monday morning) and Public.Resource.Org (our re-design page from Point.B Studio) as alpha testers to see what we can do with the XML, and we're both definitely happy customers.

It was fun working with the GPO and Federal Register teams. This is a clueful product, the price is just right, and it is an important first step in making America's operating system open source.

Government Printing Office (Thanks, Carl!)

Link.

Those of you who appreciated my earlier post about Dudeney's dissection will likely enjoy this table, commissioned by Joop Van Der Vaart from craftsman Jan de Koning, at Professor Greg N. Frederickson's page at Purdue.

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badger.foo passes on the report of Peter N. M. Hansteen that a third round of low-intensity, distributed bruteforce attacks is now in progress — we earlier discussed the first and second rounds — and that sloppy admin practice on Linux systems is the main enabler. As before, the article links to log data (this time 770 apparently already compromised Linux hosts are involved), and further references. "The fact that your rig runs Linux does not mean you're home free. You need to keep paying attention. When your spam washer has been hijacked and tries to break into other people's systems, you urgently need to get your act together, right now."

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American megacorp Cargill, which brought in $116.6 billion in revenue last year, is in the spotlight this week around the story of Stephanie Smith: the 22 year old children's dance instructor was paralyzed from the waist down after eating E. coli-tainted hamburger traced back to the meat supplier.

She was in a coma for nine weeks (that's her, hospitalized, in the photo below), and can now no longer walk. "Ground beef is not a completely safe product," one food safety expert in the article is quoted. Well, no shit. Snip from an extensive investigative report in Sunday's New York Times:

The frozen hamburgers that the Smiths ate, which were made by the food giant Cargill, were labeled "American Chef's Selection Angus Beef Patties." Yet confidential grinding logs and other Cargill records show that the hamburgers were made from a mix of slaughterhouse trimmings and a mash-like product derived from scraps that were ground together at a plant in Wisconsin. The ingredients came from slaughterhouses in Nebraska, Texas and Uruguay, and from a South Dakota company that processes fatty trimmings and treats them with ammonia to kill bacteria.

Using a combination of sources -- a practice followed by most large producers of fresh and packaged hamburger -- allowed Cargill to spend about 25 percent less than it would have for cuts of whole meat.

Those low-grade ingredients are cut from areas of the cow that are more likely to have had contact with feces, which carries E. coli, industry research shows. Yet Cargill, like most meat companies, relies on its suppliers to check for the bacteria and does its own testing only after the ingredients are ground together.

E. Coli Path Shows Flaws in Beef Inspection (New York Times)

Glendale2x writes "I'm a progressive sort of guy and I want to go full dual-stack, IPv6 for the future, etc. However I recently tried to turn up a new Verizon circuit with IPv6 (after a 6-month fiber install process), and to my chagrin the order they accepted back in May they're now saying is against their policy to provide. They're missing around 29% of the IPv6 internet and refuse to carry it. Tell me again how we're supposed to encourage IPv6 adoption in the face of a huge black hole like this?"

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