ASCAP and BMI have been pushing all sorts of ridiculous claims over the past few months, trying to squeeze extra money out of pretty much everything, rather than actually doing right by those they represent and helping them adapt new business models based on giving people a reason to buy. Beyond claiming that Congress should make sure their royalties never decrease, they've also been saying they deserve money for things like YouTube embeds (even though YouTube already pays them for that same traffic) and the 30 second previews on iTunes and other music stores. However, the most ridiculous of all was trying to claim that ringtones are a public performance, and thus mobile phone providers need to pay ASCAP/BMI. The thing is, ASCAP and BMI already get paid for ringtone purchases -- but this was an attempt to get a second payment on top of that for the fact that people might hear the ringtones.

Thankfully (as a whole bunch of you have sent in), a judge wasted little time totally rejecting that reasoning. The court pointed out that the Copyright Act is pretty clear that there's no royalty needed for any sort of "performance" that isn't done for commercial advantage and "customers do not play ringtones with any expectation of profit." It's a pretty complete rejection of an obvious stretch by ASCAP.

We might hope that ASCAP will take this and begin to recognize that the best way to serve songwriters is helping them embrace new business models, but we expect that instead they'll keep looking to squeeze more money and double dip from other providers... while continuing to pay industry insiders to smear those who want to protect consumer rights.

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An anonymous reader writes "Has anyone setup a system to aggregate multiple ISP connections to form a high bandwidth site-to-site link? Load Sharing SCTP looked interesting, but it doesn't look like it has been widely adopted. Multi-Link PPP appears to be more widely supported for clients, but I can't find any good guides for setting up both sides of the connection for a site-to-site link. The hardware solutions I've found are expensive for a small business. Does anyone have experience using hardware solutions from Mushroom Networks (Virtual Leased Line, p2 of this document), Ecessa (site-to-Site Channel Bonding), or others?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In response to a post I wrote earlier about Maywa Denki president Nobumichi Tosa's depiction of Engadget Man, Boing Boing reader RogueModron has created a solder-gun-carrying, motor-oil-haired Makezine man. But the real question is, can anybody accurately draw a Boing Boing Person?

Falcon Heene, a six-year-old boy from Colorado is missing after an experimental balloon crash landed. The boy's brother said he saw Falcon get in the balloon before it went into the air. It rose to about 11,000 feet before returning to the ground near Denver.

Police are looking for the boy. Some say he may have fallen from the balloon and others think he never got in the balloon but is hiding because he doesn't want to get into trouble.

It doesn't look to me like a helium-filled balloon this small could carry a kid aloft.

No sign of boy said to have floated off on balloon

Update: He was hiding in a cardboard box in the garage all along! [CNN]

It's already quite troubling that Pandora appears to be supporting the RIAA bailout tax against radios (Pandora's competitors), but now we have a better understanding of why, thanks to a little birdie who highlighted what's going on. Among the nasty little hidden gems in the recently agreed to webcaster settlement agreement (pdf) is that, if you want the lower rates in the settlement, you have to remove any objections to previous rate arbitrations and not participate in any future Royalty Board fights over royalties:

Article 6

Non-Participation In Further Proceedings
CPB and any Covered Entity making Web Site Transmissions in reliance on this Agreement shall not directly or indirectly participate as a party, amicus curiae or otherwise, or in any manner give evidence or otherwise support or assist, in any further proceedings to determine royalty rates and terms for digital audio transmission or the reproduction of Ephemeral Phonorecords under Section 112 or 114 of the Copyright Act for all or any part of the Term, including any appeal of the Final Determination of the Copyright Royalty Judges, published in the Federal Register at 72 FR 24084 (May 1, 2007), any proceedings on remand from such an appeal, or any other related proceedings, unless subpoenaed on petition of a third party (without any action by CPB or a Covered Entity to encourage such a petition) and ordered to testify in such proceeding.

Basically, this takes away the right of any company to fight for more reasonable royalty rates in the future -- which doesn't seem like it should be allowed. Based on this, there's basically no one left who can protest future rate increases -- which means that the RIAA/SoundExchange will easily be able to repeatedly push through greater rate increases.

Thus, since Pandora and the other webcasters won't be able to protest higher and higher rates, it needs to drag others into the fight to get help protesting constant massive rate increases: hence its support of the Performance Rights tax. In theory, if the NAB (who represents radio broadcasters) gets dragged into the fight, then there's a big dog who isn't subject to the draconian clause above, and can push back on the Copyright Royalty Board for lower performance rights taxes. Of course, that assumes that the NAB would fight for lower overall rates, rather than just focusing on rates for radio, and leaving the webcasters to fend for themselves...

No matter how you look at this, it's stunning that Pandora and other webcasters would sign away their right to state their own case in front of the CRB. RIAA/SoundExchange are laughing all the way to the bank. They get to make their case to increase royalty rates... while those who get stuck with the royalty rates have to shut up and take it. Regulatory capture at its finest. Again, we're left wondering why the Copyright Royalty Board even exists. Why are a group of old judges setting the price of music anyway?

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mikael writes "Sciencedaily.com is reporting that scientists have discovered how DNA is folded within the nucleus of a cell such that active genes remain accessible without becoming tangled. The first observation is that genes are actually stored in two locations. The first location acts as a cache where all active genes are kept. The second location is a denser storage area where inactive genes are kept. The second observation is that all genes are stored as fractal globules, which allows genes that are used together to be adjacent to each other when folded, even though they may be far apart when unfolded."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Painter and photographer Laura Levine is one of several photographers whose work is on exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum's Who Shot Rock & Roll: A Photographic History, 1955 to the Present. She says: "The exhibition and companion book include two of my favorite portraits, of Bjork and R.E.M. To mark this event, I am making signed fine art prints of both these images available through a special offer."

UPDATE: Here's a link to a many more rock and roll photographs by Laura. They include interesting background stories.

Laura Levine fine art and photography prints

The Poulsen's Wire Recorder Kit from the Maker Shed uses a wire and the power of magnetism to record your own voice! Record and play back sound on almost any metal that can be magnetized -- a wire, scissors, a knife, an escalator? Try it!

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It may smell like rotten eggs, but it turns out H₂S may be able to slow down the chain of chemical degradation that causes death in cells that are deprived of oxygen. Biologist Mark Roth can supposedly take a lab rat, stop its heart with a dose of hydrogen sulfide, and bring it back to life an hour later just by turning off the gas. Quoting now from this article at CNN.com:

Scientists are starting to understand that death isn't caused by oxygen deprivation itself, but by a chain of damaging chemical reactions that are triggered by sharply dropping oxygen levels. The thing is, those reactions require the presence of some oxygen. Hydrogen sulfide takes the place of oxygen, preventing those reactions from taking place. No chain reaction, no cell death.

Roth has won a MacArthur grant for this work, so there's a better-than-average chance that it's more than just hype.

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A parish leader in Hammond, Louisiana is in the hot seat with the ACLU for refusing to grant a marriage license to a mixed race couple. Keith Bardwell of Tangipahoa Parish insists that he is not a racist, he's merely looking out for the well-being of the children that the couple might bear.

"I do ceremonies for black couples right here in my house," Bardwell said. "My main concern is for the children." ...He came to the conclusion that most of black society does not readily accept offspring of such relationships, and neither does white society, he said. "I don't do interracial marriages because I don't want to put children in a situation they didn't bring on themselves," Bardwell said. "In my heart, I feel the children will later suffer."

Meanwhile, the yet-to-be-married couple, 30-year old Beth Humphrey and 32-year old Terence McKay, are looking to file a discrimination complaint with the Justice Department, and the ACLU is asking the Louisiana Supreme Court to investigate. Just for the record, it is illegal for a parish leader to refuse to marry a couple on the basis of their race. Interracial couple denied marriage license in La.

Steve Tarzia writes "A research group at Northwestern University and University of Michigan has released open-source display power-management software that uses a new user presence detection technique. The goal is to shut off the display immediately when the user leaves the computer rather than using slow and error-prone mouse/keyboard activity timeouts. Surprisingly, the mic and speakers of many laptop computers are sensitive to ultrasonic frequencies. Those frequencies can be used to silently probe the laptop's physical environment. This software is based on research published at the UbiComp2009 conference. A Windows binary and source code for Windows and Linux are available for download."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A few weeks back, we were one of the first publications to highlight how singer Edwyn Collins was unable to put his own hit song on MySpace for free download (as he wanted to do) because Warner Music claimed copyright over it -- even though it had no such copyright. Despite quite an effort by Collins' manager/wife, Grace Maxwell, nothing was changing. However, the story started to spread, including making it into some major media properties, such as the BBC and The Guardian... and whaddaya know, suddenly everything gets fixed. Mesanna writes in to let us know of an update post from Maxwell, where she points out that the power of the press seemed to finally accomplish what simple reasoning with both MySpace and Warner Music could not:

However, whaddaya know? After 30 odd fruitless emails, A Girl Like You is now available in full on the myspace player! So, todays lesson is simple:

THE MOST POWERFUL DEPARTMENT IN ANY ORGANISATION IS THE PRESS OFFICE.
The whole sad world runs scared of bad publicity, especially from a righteous source like Edwyn Collins.

While Maxwell says it's not worth the ridiculous effort it would take to sue Warner Music or any other major label claiming copyright over Collins' songs, she's more than willing to help out in other cases against them:

Warner Music Group has no connection with Edwyn whatsoever and yet they are still corporately arrogant enough to steal Edwyn's copyright and God knows what else from others. A guy from myspace advised me to treat their copyright department with kid gloves if I wanted a result. It didn't work. If the shoe was on the other foot they'd have been down on us like a ton of bricks. The next time a major tries to take ANYONE to court for copyright infringment, I'm volunteering my services as a witness for the defense.

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What do you do when you can't make robotic systems sensitive enough to detect faint traces of an unknown explosive? Normally, one would train dogs, but apparently this takes many months, and many treats. Inscentinel has a different solution- why not use bees instead? They claim that within a few hours, they can train a whole crop of bees to sniff out and react to a different kinds of scent, and then the bees are released back to their hive at the end of their shift.

Maybe someday, they will team up with the people who are creating remote-controlled beetles, in order to create an army of sensor insects to fly around and monitor everything. Which might be ok, as long as they don't sting me for not doing my laundry. [via neatorama]

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Josh Klein developed a machine that trains crows to trade coins for peanuts. Literally, for peanuts. So you fill this thing with peanuts and set it out, say, in a public park, and the crows will scour the ground for loose change, carry it to the machine, and drop it in a slot in exchange for food. The project, dubbed "CrowBox," made a big splash when he unveiled it back in 2007. Now he's made the complete plans for the CrowBox freely available online so you can roll your own. And there's no reason you couldn't train your fly-monkeys-fly to gather other crow-portable objects. Twenty-dollar bills? Keys? iPods? Human eyes? The possibilities are endless. Set one up at the beach! Train seagulls to trade whole wallets for pre-shucked oysters!

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An anonymous reader writes "ABC News is reporting that a California woman is suing Toyota for $10 million for sending her email that appeared to be from a criminal stalker. The woman claims the emails terrified her to the point that she suffered sleeplessness, poor work performance, etc. Toyota says the ruse was part of a marketing campaign for the Toyota Matrix. A Toyota spokesman says they are not liable for the woman's distress, because 'The person who made this claim specifically opted in, granting her permission to receive campaign emails and other communications from Toyota.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Access Copyright, a Canadian copyright collections agency that has already positioned the discussions on copyright reform in Canada as a war against consumers, has had its submission to the government on the topic published, and it's really quite stunning in that it says that "fair dealing" (the Canadian version of fair use) is already too broad and needs to be greatly restricted. But the really stunning statement from the filing is the following:

Access Copyright submits that good public policy should not be dictated by legalizing common public practices.

Actually, it seems that's the very definition of good public policy. You know what bad public policy is? Destroying basic consumer rights and criminalizing basic consumer behavior because some obsolete organization can't figure out a way to adjust its business model.

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(Download MP4 video or Watch on YouTube, or view with subtitles on Dotsub).

Institute for the Future teamed up with Sun Microsystems and Boing Boing Video to co-host the Digital Open, an online tech expo for teens 17 and under around the world.

In today's episode, you'll meet Brennon Williams, a teen from Hillsborough, CA, who created an online robotics store for beginners:

The BW Science Labs Store is an idea I've had for a while now, but it has taken a lot of work to get it up and running. There is currently 1 kit available, the Vivus the Robot kit. I"ve seen a lot of those really low-quality $20 robots where you clap your hands and they twitch, and I've seen $400 robots with a great deal of functionality. I wanted to make something in between, and that's exactly what Vivus is. During prototyping I wanted to make a "real robot", one that was autonomous and could truly act on its own, while trying to keep the cost down as well. 

Brennon cited Maker Faire and Make Magazine as inspirations for his work, and you can see why! Read more about the youth competition in IFTF's press release announcing Digital Open winners.

Tomorrow, Friday the 16th, at noon Pacific time, we will be giving away another prize bundle consisting of one Microchip Technology PIC10F Cap Touch Demo Board and one MCP1650 Multiple White LED Demo Board.

This time, the winner will be selected from among our Facebook fans. To enter, become our "fan" (if you're not already) and post a reply on our Facebook page in the contest thread (under the "Discussions" tab) containing the phrase "Microchip Technology giveaway gamma" sometime in the next 24 hours.

The winner will be announced Friday afternoon.

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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Oh, how I love fightorflight from Metafilter's checklist on why your plan to save journalism won't work. Top marks!

Your post advocates a

( ) technical ( ) legislative (X) market-based ( ) crowd-sourced

approach to saving journalism. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws owing to the avaraciousness of modern publishers.)

( ) It does not provide an income stream to the working journalist
( ) Nobody will spend eight hours sitting in a dull council meeting to do it
( ) No one will be able to find the guy
(X) It is defenseless against copy-and-paste
(X) It tries to prop up a fundamentally broken business model
(X) Users of the web will not put up with it
( ) Print readers will not put up with it
( ) Good journalists will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from unwilling sources
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
(X) Many publishers cannot afford to lose what little business they have left
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
( ) Even papers run by trusts and charities are already going bankrupt

Specifically, your plan fails to account for

(X) Readers' unwillingness to pay for just news
( ) The existence and popularity of the BBC
(X) Unavoidable availability of free alternatives
( ) Sources' proven unwillingness to "go direct"
( ) The difficulty of investigative journalism
( ) The massive tedium of investigative journalism
(X) The high cost of investigative journalism
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
(X) Editorial departments small enough to be profitable are too small to do real reporting
( ) Legal liability of "citizen journalism"
( ) The training required to be even an rubbish journalist
(X) What readers want, in the main, is celebrity and football
( ) The necessity of the editing process
(X) Americans' huge distrust of professional journalism
( ) Reluctance of governments and corporations to be held to account by two guys with a blog
( ) Inability of two guys with a blog to demand anything
( ) How easy it is for subjects to manipulate two guys with no income
( ) Rupert Murdoch
( ) The inextricably local nature of much newsgathering
( ) The dependence of all other forms of news media on print reporting
( ) The dependence of national press on local press reporting
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) The tragedy of the commons
( ) The classified-driven business model of much print publishing
(X) The tiny amounts of money to be made from online ads for small sites

Problem with your plan to save media: the checklist (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)

Princeton's David Tank just published a paper in Nature describing how he used the open-source Quake 2 engine to power a VR maze that he ran mice through in order to study their neurons while they moved. My wife, who played Quake on the British national team, wants to teach the mouse to rocket-jump.

Tank's team designed an apparatus in which a mouse, its head firmly held in a metal helmet, walks on the surface of a styrofoam ball. The ball is kept aloft by a jet of air, so that it functions like a multidirectional treadmill. Around it are sensors taken from optical computer mice, which read the ball's movement as the mouse runs.

Those readings were the input for the researchers' virtual reality software -- a modified version of the open source Quake 2 videogame engine, tweaked to project an image on a screen surrounding the mouse. Tank called it "a mini-IMAX theater." Mice in the study ran through a virtual maze designed in the open source Quake game editor, but rather than earning points or power-ups, they were rewarded with sips of water from a head-side nozzle.

Into the hippocampus of each mouse the researchers inserted a glass capillary just one micron wide at its tip and filled with salt water. Known as a whole-cell patch recorder, it detects electrical currents as they pulse through individual cells.

"It is difficult to overstate the importance of understanding how the dynamics of electrical activity within single neurons is related to firing patterns among collections of neurons that accompany the performance of complex tasks," wrote Douglas Nitz, a University of California at San Diego cognitive scientist, in a commentary accompanying the findings.

Scientists Scan the Brains of Mice Playing Quake

Artist Chris O'Shea ran an installation on the BBC's Big Screens in which he composited in a "hand of God" on live footage of the street so that "unsuspecting pedestrians will be tickled, stretched, flicked or removed entirely in real-time by a giant deity." Creative Review has details on the tech behind the prankish miracle. "The hand from above"

TechReviewAl writes "Technology Review reports that the Chinese government has for the first time targeted the Tor anonymity network. In the run up to in China's National Day celebrations, the government started targeting the sites used to distribute Tor addresses and the number of users inside China dropped from tens of thousands to near zero. The move is part of a broader trend that involves government's launching censorship crackdowns around key dates. The good news is that many Tor users quickly found a way around the attack, distributing 'bridge' addresses via IM and Twitter."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This is terrifying ...

A 6-year-old boy is floating over northeastern Colorado in a homebuilt lighter-than-air craft and authorities are racing to try and rescue him. The homemade flying saucer , covered in foil and filled with helium, lifted the boy into the air near Fort Collins Thursday morning after the balloon became untethered at the family home. Fort Collins police and other authorities have been alerted and Airtracker 7 has launched in an effort to locate the boy. We're told the boy was near Milliken around noon and was heading southeast at about 7,000 feet, which would be about 2,000 feet above ground level. Skies in the area are partly cloudy and southwest wind speeds are 15 to 20 miles per hour. "It is believed the device could rise to 10,000 feet," said Eloise Campanella, Larimer County Sheriff's Officer spokeswoman. Deputies from Larimer and Weld counties are tracking the balloon as it drifts.

Pictured above, lawn chair balloon pilot.

CNN has more (live right now) ... Not really good news.

Our thoughts are with the family and community regarding this tragic event, we hope it works out.

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iRobot is developing a soft mobile morphing robots, designed to crawl through tiny holes and cracks.

Researchers from iRobot and the University of Chicago discussed their palm-sized soft robot, known as a chemical robot, or chembot, at the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems yesterday. It's "the first demonstration of a completely soft, mobile robot using jamming as an enabling technology," they write in a paper presented at the conference. 

The concept of "jamming skin enabled locomotion" is explained quite nicely in the video. The polymer used for the bot's stretchy skin is off-the-shelf silicone two-part rubber.

iRobot's Shape-Shifting Blob 'Bot Takes Its First Steps( Thanks, Gever!)

The second episode of CreatureCast is now online! Created by evolutionary biologist Casey Dunn and his students at Brown University, CreatureCast is a terrific Web video series about unusual animals and evolution. Sophia Tintori, a student whose research focuses on marine invertebrates called Siphonophorae, put together the first episode, about squid iridescence, and this one too. Professor Dunn says:

(Tintori) spoke with Cassandra Extavour about the evolution and development of multicellularity, and how the ability to contribute to the next generation of organisms is usually restricted to a small population of special cells. This topic is near and dear to the research we do in our lab. Among other things, we look at the division of labor, including the ability to reproduce, in siphonophores.

CreatureCast Episode 2

Starry nom...

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Slash: Paper Under the Knife (warning: autoplay video) is the NYC Museum of Arts and Design's third major exhibition, and if it's anywhere near the quality of Radical Lace and Subversive Knitting or Pricked: Extreme Embroidery, it should be fantastic. MAKE favorite Brian Dettmer is involved, as well as many many other incredible paper artists.

Slash: Paper Under the Knife takes the pulse of the international art world's renewed interest in paper as a creative medium and source of artistic inspiration, examining the remarkably diverse use of paper in a range of art forms. Slash is the third exhibition in MAD's Materials and Process series, which examines the renaissance of traditional handcraft materials and techniques in contemporary art and design. The exhibition surveys unusual paper treatments, including works that are burned, torn, cut by lasers, and shredded. A section of the exhibition will focus on artists who modify books to transform them into sculpture, while another will highlight the use of cut paper for film and video animations.

Selected artists will be commissioned to create site-specific or site-referential works, and others will be invited to create work onsite in MAD's three artist studios that will subsequently be installed in the exhibition.

Slash: Paper Under the Knife

October 7, 2009 - April 4, 2010

Museum of Arts and Design

2 Columbus Circle NYC

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Here's an odd one. Apparently Toronto Raptors forward Chris Bosh was given control over 800 domain names related to NBA basketball players that had been cybersquatted. I'm not sure what it is with professional basketball players and domain name speculation -- as this is the second such story involving that combination -- but what struck me as odd about this is why Bosh was given all the domain names. Bosh had sued over the registration and use of chrisbosh.com -- so you could understand a ruling that gave him control over that domain name. But why give him the other 799 domain names involving other players as well? Bosh has said he'll hand over the rights to the other players for free, but it still doesn't make sense why he got control over them in the first place.

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The idea of synthetic biology is to engineer modular genetic components that can be snapped together like Tinkertoys to create new organisms that don't exist in nature. Inspired by this incredible concept, designers Sascha Pohflepp and Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg developed an imaginary design for a futuristic herbicide sprayer, constructed from engineered plant parts, that would "protect delicate engineered horticultural machines from older nature." From their designs, Sion Ap Tomos created antique-looking botanical illustrations of the various components. Top left, "Growth Assembly"; top right, "Herbicide Gourd." A video about the project is after the jump...



From the Growth Assembly project statement:

After the cost of energy had made global shipping of raw materials and packaged goods unimaginable, only the rich could afford traditional, mass-produced commodities. Synthetic biology enabled us to harness our natural environment for the production of things. Coded into the DNA of a plant, product parts grow within the supporting system of the plant's structure. When fully developed, they are stripped like a walnut from its shell or corn from its husk, ready for assembly.

"Growth Assembly" (Thanks, Mathias Crawford!)

nandemoari writes "T-Mobile is taking a huge financial hit in the fallout over the Sidekick data loss. But Microsoft, which bears at least part of the responsibility for the mistake, is paying the price with its reputation. As reported earlier this week, the phone network had to admit that some users' data had been permanently lost due to a problem with a server run by Microsoft-owned company Danger. The handset works by storing data such as contacts and appointments on a remote computer rather than on the phone itself. BBC news reports today that Microsoft has in fact recovered all data, but a minority are still affected (out of 1 million subscribers). Amidst this, Microsoft appears not to have suffered any financial damage. However, it seems certain that its relationship with T-Mobile will have taken a major knock. The software giant is also the target of some very bad publicity as critics question how on earth it failed to put in place adequate back-ups of the data. That could seriously damage the potential success of the firm's other 'cloud computing' plans, such as web-only editions of Office."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Rina from the excellent, free SF in SF reading series sez,

<p< Join us Saturday, Oct. 17th, and meet multiple Hugo Award winner Kim Stanley Robinson and local author Eric Simons. K.S. Robinson's new book, "The Lucky Strike," is out from PM Press, as part of their new Outspoken Authors series. It begins on a lonely Pacific island, where a crew of untested men are about to take off in an untried aircraft with a deadly payload that will change our world forever. Until something goes wonderfully wrong...

Eric Simons is the author of the wonderfully quirky "Darwin Slept Here" based on his own journey to see the people, places, and legends that interested Darwin, and what they're like now.

Saturday, Oct. 17/Doors and Cash Bar open 6:00pm/Readings start 7:00pm

Readings will be followed by Q & A moderated by author Terry Bisson.

The Variety Preview Room Theatre
The Hobart Bldg., 1st Floor/582 Market St. @ 2nd & Montgomery San Francisco, CA

Don't drive! Take BART or Muni to Montgomery St. Station; we're right outside the exit.

Bar proceeds go to Variety Children's Charity of Northern California; learn more at www.varietync.org

Kim Stanley Robinson & Eric Simons (Thanks, Rina!)

A biologist is studying how poison gas can be used to induce a state of "suspended animation" in small animals. Someday, it might even work on people. The idea is that if someone has suffered a critical injury, the technique could be used to delay death so that emergency care could be administered. Roth, a MacArthur "Genius," has had some success with mice. He used hydrogen sulfide to dramatically drop the rodents' breathing rate and reversed the process after six hours. It hasn't scaled up to larger animals so far, but he's working on it. Meanwhile, other techniques to slow metabolism for similar purposes are also showing promising. From CNN:

"You get a state of suspended animation and the creatures do not pass away, and that's the basis of what we see as an alternative way to think about critical care medicine," Roth says. "What you want to do is to have the patient's time slowed down, while everyone around them [like doctors] move at what we would call real time."

If the patient's time -- the process of your death -- were slowed down, doctors would have more time to fix you. In medicine, time is key. An analogy is the history of open heart surgery. For years, surgeons had the technical tools to make simple repairs on the heart, but they couldn't help patients until the development of the heart-lung machine made it possible to preserve the body for more than a few minutes without a heartbeat...

Other researchers are exploring different approaches to tweak metabolism in a critical care setting. A group in Minnesota is developing a drug based on chemicals found in hibernating squirrels. Dr. Philip Bickler, an anesthesiologist at the University of San Francisco Hospital, is also studying animals, including whales and dolphins -- mammals like us, except that they can hold their breath for two hours underwater even during vigorous activity. Bickler says, "There's a lot of potential there. It hasn't been studied in extreme detail, but there may be new ways to protect human tissue from injury.

"Scientists hope work with poison gas can be a lifesaver"

Molly sez, "Home Movie Day (Oct 17) is a celebration of amateur films and filmmaking held annually at many local venues worldwide. Home Movie Day events provide the opportunity for individuals and families to see and share their own home movies with an audience of their community, and to see their neighbors' in turn. It's a chance to discover why to care about these films and to learn how best to care for them. Check out www.homemovieday.com for a location near you! 'Home Movie Day is important because our lives, our recollections, and our truth is recorded in home movies. One day, what the heck, c'mon!' -Steve Martin"

Home Movie Day 2009 (Thanks, Molly!)

An anonymous reader writes "In this week's issue of Nature, scientists from Princeton University trained mice to navigate around a virtual environment using a setup that resembles a combination of a giant trackball and a mini-iMax theater displaying a virtual world rendered using a modified version of the Quake 2 open source game engine. (Here's the academic paper, subscription required.) They hold the mouse's head still atop a giant trackball, which the mouse turns by running. The scientists use the rotations to move the mouse around in the virtual environment, and when he reaches certain places, he gets a reward. Because they are able to hold the head still, they can stick microscopic glass electrodes into individual neurons in the hippocampus of this mouse as it 'navigates.' They find the neural activity that resembles activity during real life navigation, and learned new things about the inputs and computations that are going on inside these neurons, which weren't known before. No word as of yet whether the scientists plan on giving the mice control of the gun. Wonder whether John Carmack ever envisioned this when he opened up the Quake code?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Last year, we pointed out that some car companies were experimenting with adding fake engine noises to their cars, after complaints were heard that hybrid and electric vehicles were "too quiet" and sneaking up on people. Apparently, those original experiments are turning into a groundswell. After some politicians decided to put forth legislation requiring such sounds, apparently lots of car companies are adding sounds to their cars, such as Nissan's recently announced plan to include futuristic Blade Runner-style sounds. Reading through that NY Times article, it seems like the car companies are less concerned about the safety issues, but are excited about the idea of opening up a new market for selling "car tones" -- like ringtones, but for your car noise. Can't we just set it to vibrate? In the meantime, there appears to be no evidence that these hybrid and electric "menaces" are causing any more accidents in their "silent, but deadly" current state.

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

Matt writes in:

We are working on a project to control a CW ham radio keyer using a computer, and are concerned about protecting the computer from the radio. We heard that an opto-isolator could be used for this, but aren't sure how to go about it.

Good question! An opto-coupler is a device that can be used to electrically isolate two circuits, so that a voltage spike or other problem on one side will not destroy the circuit on the other side. A common use for them is when you want to interface a computer to an AC-powered device, such as a light or a motor. Usually, the opto-coupler will not be used to control the device directly, and instead will just transfer a signal from one circuit to another.

So, how does it work? You can think of an optocoupler as a combination of an LED and a phototransistor. To send a signal, the transmitting side power the internal LED, just as you would power a regular LED. This lights up and causes the phototransistor on the other to start conducting current. You can think of it as kind of a switch at this point, and use it to turn on a low-power device directly, or turn on a relay to turn on a higher-powered device. The above circuit diagram should work for an automatic keyer. Choose the resistor based on your microcontroller voltage and the current draw of the optocoupler chip that you use. One thing to remember is that the output is polarized, so you have to make sure to connect it up so that the high voltage side is on the collector, and the low voltage side on the emitter. Good luck with your keyer!

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In anticipation of his upcoming performance at the Engadget party that was held last night in Tokyo, artist/performer Nobumichi Tosa of Maywa Denki drew this charming illustration of what he predicted the typical "Engadget Man" would look like. He points out details like glasses, clean hair, backpack, a small goatie, a rather expensive shirt, Uniqlo pants, an iPod, and leather shoes. Tosa writes this in the most inoffensive, matter-of-fact way, more as an artistic impression than as a judgmental stereotype. He mentions below the illo that Make Japan also has parties like this, but that somehow the Engadget Man gives the impression of being cleaner and better-off than the Make Person.

My grandfather had chickens. Not chickens in the city, but, like, 100+ semi-feral chickens running around in a sort of anarchic "free range" on five acres of overgrown Christmas tree farm.

In other words, my grandfather ran a very nice coyote buffet.

God knows, the man tried--waging a Warner Bros.-worthy battle against the coyotes through most of my childhood. But as he got older, he kind of became frustrated at the lack of real progress and just gave up.

This story does have a point. Promise. I found out recently that HealthNewsReview.org--a fairly self-explanatory organization dedicated to weeding good health reporting from bad--would no longer be reviewing stories taken from television news. But where does that leave us chickens? I called up Gary Schwitzer, the seasoned journalist and professor behind HealthNewsReview to find out.

Let's start with the basics, where did HealthNewsReview.org come from?
I became enamored with an Australian effort to which I give endless credit--Media Doctor. There are now Media Doctor sites in Canada and Hong Kong, as well. As soon as I saw the concept I thought, "Oh my god, why did the Hell did we let the Aussies beat us to this?" I tracked down the Australian researcher who originated the idea and he was extremely gracious and said I could copy the format. But I changed the name, though. I'm a journalist and I was sensitive about other journalists having knee-jerk defensive reactions to the name. I thought Media Doctor would imply something was broken and needed fixing.

It got to be hourly briefings on patient urine output...rather than reporting on evidence and tech assessment, and cost, and access and all the things that now become our criteria on Health News Review...

But isn't something broken?
There are problems, yes. I worked in daily health news in Milwaukee and Dallas, and for CNN. I walked away with a lot of frustration. It was mostly the CNN experience that frustrated me. In the early days of CNN, we had this tremendous, exciting opportunity. The channel could be place to go in-depth with background and be analytical and contextual. But then the management side swung the other way and preferred to be the wire service of the air--take anything happening anywhere and report it with a quick turnaround. That's the continued recipe for disaster in my eyes. Into that was thrown the maelstrom of artificial heart experiments in the early 1980s. I saw how all of the incentives were to just have the information everyone else had, but more often. It got to be hourly briefings on patient urine output and stuff like that, rather than reporting on evidence and tech assessment, and cost, and access and all the things that now become our criteria on HealthNewsReview. We flood news consumers with this stuff and it does more harm than good.

We become complicit cheerleaders, and not independent vetters of sensational claims. When you think about the environment we're in right now, journalists have to take some of the blame for the inability of us, as a people, to have a meaningful health care reform discussion. We've created this sense of a pill for every ill. And God help you if you talk about comparative effectiveness research that may raise questions about efficacy, because you better not take that pill away from me or you're rationing.

Some cancer screening tests, like for prostate cancer, are an example of this, right?
Yes. You get news stories that promote screening outside the boundaries of evidence. You'll be bombarded with subjective, passionate, crusading comments that really say, "Let the evidence be damned. I've had this and it saved my life." And we just have to drop back and have a discussion about evidence. There's so much uncertainty that people need to get involved and make the decision for themselves. It's a mistake if people are hearing that they shouldn't be screened. But right now, you only hear the benefits. And there are potential harms.

Is TV really worse on this than other types of media?
TV is terrible, especially on the morning shows--just awful awful imbalanced, cheerleading, crusading crap day, after day, after day. But the rest of the media isn't off the hook. I compare what I hear from some journalists to what I hear from some doctors, "Yeah I may go on free trips and speaker fees from big pharma but I'm not influenced. I'm worried about my colleagues, but I'm fine." Similarly some journalists look at what we've done and say, "We don't do any of these mistakes." But I'm telling you, 70% of almost 900 stories we've reviewed fail to discuss costs, harms, and benefits. Somebody has to take responsibility for that.

If everybody is flawed and good reporting is so important, why give up on TV news?
It's not that we're looking the other way on TV, but they don't care. They don't want to listen. We had a lead person at one network flat out say, "Don't even bother to notify me. I won't share your review with my staff, because it's unfair to apply the same criteria to us as to print." That guy was praising of the effort before we'd launched. He saw our evaluation criteria and thought we were looking at the right stuff. But when it comes down to it, they don't like feeling like someone is telling them how to write. And that has to end. If you can't do health reporting right, it's OK to just stop reporting on new tech and discoveries, because you may be doing more harm than good.

Where does this leave news consumers, though? Does this mean HealthNewsReview is more for journalists than for the people who read their work?
Absolutely not. In fact, we're undergoing a complete site redesign to make it abundantly clear that the site is for consumers, as well. We want consumers to see that the way we evaluate health news stories is the same way they can evaluate claims coming from any source. They can use the same 10 criteria we apply to the review of stories. We're adding new sections to the redesigned site to emphasize why each of the 10 criteria matter. All along, in fact, I thought that if journalists ignored our work (which, for the most part, they haven't), that consumers would still benefit from our scrutiny of claims.

The thing is, though, we have limited resources. We will continue to comment on TV, but I'm not going to go through the time resource drain of manually transcribing broadcasts and having three different people apply criteria, as we did before we threw in the towel, only to have the TV reporters explicitly tell us that they'll be ignoring it.

Sad TV image courtesy Flickr user aprillynn77, via CC.

David Wahl, a blogger for Archie McPhee's Monkey Goggles blog, wrote a funny story about the time he was working at a toy store in Seattle and assisted Mick Jagger when he came in to shop.

The female owner of the store approached him and I thought her head was going to split in half from the size of her smile. "Mr. Jagger," she said, "I just have to tell you how much your music means to me. I lost my virginity to one of your songs in the back of a 1965 Chevy convertible. 'Jumping Jack Flash!'"

"That's very sweet of you," he muttered, indicating with a slight flare of his right nostril that the conversation was over and that she should leave him alone. But, to her it was as if he had swooped her off her feet, carried her out side and made love to her. That simple sentence flushed her cheeks and made her eyes roll back in ecstasy.

Then he began to shop. At first, I didn't understand his method of shopping. As he entered each new room of the store, he would begin taking things off the shelf and stacking them in the middle of the room. As he left, I would start putting them back, cursing at him under my breath for making a mess. Then, it dawned on me I was supposed to be carrying these items to the register for him.

The photo above is from The Rolling Stone's underrated Their Satanic Majesties Request from 1967 (Read Richard Metzger's essay about the album at Dangerous Minds). Doesn't it look like the lads bought their costumes from a toy store?

Mick Jagger's Adventures in Toyland

Reber Is Reber writes "The Wi-Fi Alliance announced a new wireless networking specification which will enable devices to establish simple peer-to-peer wireless connections without the need for a wireless router or hotspot. Wi-Fi Direct has a wide array of potential uses, many of which encroach on Bluetooth territory and threaten to make the competing wireless protocol obsolete. 'Wi-Fi Direct represents a leap forward for our industry. Wi-Fi users worldwide will benefit from a single-technology solution to transfer content and share applications quickly and easily among devices, even when a Wi-Fi access point isn't available,' said Wi-Fi Alliance executive director Edgar Figueroa. 'The impact is that Wi-Fi will become even more pervasive and useful for consumers and across the enterprise.' Ad hoc wireless networking has always been more complex and cumbersome than it is worth, and it maxes out at 11 mbps. Wi-Fi Direct will connect at existing Wi-Fi speeds-- up to 250 mbps. Wi-Fi Direct devices will also be able to broadcast their availability and seek out other Wi-Fi Direct devices. Wi-Fi Direct overlaps into Bluetooth territory. Bluetooth is a virtually ubiquitous technology used for wireless connection of devices like headphones, mice, or the ever-popular Bluetooth earpiece sticking out of everyone's head. Bluetooth uses less power, but also has a much shorter range and slower transfer speeds. Wi-Fi Direct can enable the same device connectivity as Bluetooth, but at ranges and speeds equivalent to what users experience with existing Wi-Fi connections."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Do you think Ralph Lauren would also consider this photo to be a "very distorted image of a woman's body?" Compare the image to to this.

Another image from a window display in Sydney, that reveals toothpick legs, is at Photoshop Disasters.

Instructables user neorazz has posted a tutorial on how to build a dust separator attachment for your shop vac. It is described as "cyclonic," which it may or may not actually be (see the comments), but it does, apparently, work quite well at separating out the heavier bits of flotsam (which ends up in the bucket) from the actual dust (which goes on to the vacuum).

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We've already covered how Rupert Murdoch has flip flopped his position on free online news, but his recent foray into blaming search engines and aggregators is really reaching the height of hypocrisy. We've already looked into the issue of aggregators and found there's no problem there at all. Most aggregators either direct traffic to the original sites or are too small to matter. There's no evidence they actually siphon any traffic away at all... but it seems that the old newspaper guys need an enemy, and these days it's those evil "aggregators."

Following on the lead of his boss, News Corp. General Counsel Lawrence Jacobs made some interesting statements, claiming that aggregators are a big problem:

"Aggregators and Google News are, to us, the worst offenders," general counsel Lawrence Jacobs said today at a luncheon talk at Brooklyn Law School. "They make money by living off the sweat of our brow."

This isn't just ridiculous and wrong, it's hypocrisy of the worst kind. As Gabe Rivera points out, just a few years ago, News Corp was happily hyping up its own aggregator, and even today it appears to run a number of different aggregators, with a Wall Street Journal editor proudly talking about how useful the aggregator is. Fox News has its own news aggregator, the WSJ's tech page has Popular Technology Stories from Around the Web and AllThingsD has its "Voices" section -- all of which aggregate content from elsewhere with no payment.

So, according to News Corp., News Corp., is one of the worst offenders, right?

And, of course, things get even worse, the more you look at what Jacobs has to say. As one of our readers pointed out earlier this week, not only doesn't Fox News use robots.txt to block Google and other aggregators, it specifically tells Google News where to find its news. So as its execs and lawyers are whining about how evil Google News is to index its site, its tech people are putting up a big glowing sign that says "Hey! Google News! Over here! Come and get it!" Hypocrites. By the way, Weston Kosova, over at Newsweek even wrote up a nice little column based on our reader's comment. According to News Corp. and Jacobs, Newsweek just made money "off the sweat of our brow" (or technically, our readers). But, frankly, I think it's pretty awesome that someone from Newsweek isn't just reading Techdirt, but getting value out of our community as well.

Oh, and why stop there? Seeing as Lawrence Jacobs is general counsel of News Corp., one has to assume that he's a lawyer with a real law degree and such. And thus, you would think that he was familiar with copyright doctrines in the US, and would choose his language carefully. It's then especially odd that he chose the phrase "sweat of our brow" in describing his complaint, given that in Feist, the US explicitly rejected "sweat of the brow" as a reason to grant copyright. Since Jacobs appears unfamiliar with the ruling in Feist, here's a quote for him:

It may seem unfair that much of the fruit of the compiler's labor may be used by others without compensation. As Justice Brennan has correctly observed, however, this is not "some unforeseen byproduct of a statutory scheme." Harper & Row, 471 U.S., at 589 (dissenting opinion). It is, rather, "the essence of copyright," ibid., and a constitutional requirement. The primary objective of copyright is not to reward the labor of authors, but "to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts.... The "sweat of the brow" doctrine had numerous flaws....

So, let's sum up. While Murdoch and Jacobs are out trashing aggregators for making money based on the sweat of their brow, News. Corp. itself gleefully offers up at least three aggregators itself, which its writers and editors happily promote. The tech staff uses its robots.txt file to point aggregators to exactly where they should go, explicitly calling out some aggregators (the "worst" according to Jacobs) by name. And, oh yeah, the Supreme Court has already ruled that the "sweat of the brow" argument is meaningless when it comes to copyright law.

Time for a rethink, perhaps?

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Animator Nick Cross created this fantastic funny animal cartoon featuring geopolitical bullying, social unrest, worker revolt, and some tasty yellow cakes. I'd kill for a yellow cake right about now.

svonkie writes "Two prominent IP lawyers have warned that the all-pervasive General Public License version 2 (GPLv2) is legally unsound. They claim GPLv3 and AGPLv3 are much better suited for the realities of modern open source software. "If you go back in time to when GPLv2 was written, I don't think people were aware of just how ubiquitous this license would become and how closely scrutinized it would be," said Mark Radcliffe, partner at the firm DLA Piper and general counsel for the Open Source Initiative (OSI). "At that time, open source was not something as broadly used as it is now." Radcliffe was joined by Karen Copenhaver, partner at Choate Hall & Stewart and counsel for the Linux Foundation, for a GPL web conference hosted by the license-sniffing firm Black Duck software"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

My mother's uncle, Arno Schmidt, was a German author who lived between 1914 and 1979. He left a collection of his work to his sister Lucy, my grandmother, and when she died in 1977, the collection was passed to my mother. Legend has it that he gave the collection to his sister because he wanted a backup of his work in the United States.

Time goes by, and now my mother is thinking about passing on her stuff, and we want to do the right thing with Arno's legacy. There's a museum in Germany that wants the books, but they already have copies, and Arno wanted a copy in the US, so we're going to try to get him his wish.

I've listed our collection of books in a separate post.

We're looking for a university in the United States, probably one with a German Studies Department and a library, to take the whole collection. We're not looking to make money from this donation, it's strictly a gift, but we would like to have the materials accessible to the public. Ideally we'd like to work with a university in NY or the Bay Area because that's where our family is.

I wanted to make this offer publicly, through my blog, because it seems consistent with my efforts to get our electronic work archived. Here's a chance to learn how it's done with writing created in the mid-20th century. If you are at a university that is interested, either post a comment here, or send me an email at dave dot winer at gmail dot com. Thanks!

So everyone who knows me knows I love angler fish, if only because they're hard to love. Oh, and the whole bioluminescent thing doesn't hurt, either. Instructables user thenickboy made this anger fish mask for Halloween with LEDs on the body and a keychain light for the end of the "fishing pole." The idea of eating party snacks and drinking beverages through a straw while wearing this mask makes me excited it's almost Halloween.

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Cobwebs of The Art of Darkness shows how to turn a tiny plastic skeleton into a mummified pixie for Halloween purposes or for hoaxing gullible Britons. She calls it a "doom it yourself" project.

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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coondoggie writes "A 12-million-digit prime number, the largest such number ever discovered, has landed a voluntary math research group a $100,000 prize from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). The number, known as a Mersenne prime, is the 45th known Mersenne prime, written shorthand as 2 to the power of 43,112,609, minus 1 . A Mersenne number is a positive integer that is one less than a power of two, the group stated. The computing project called the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS) made the discovery on a computer at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Mathematics Department."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Owen Kelly has a nice post up, where he basically admits that, even though he's not against copying, he had an initial visceral bad reaction when he recently saw his own work copied, but after taking a step back and thinking about it rationally, he realized it wasn't so bad. The problem is that most people, when they see their own work copied, never take that second step. They see it, they freak out and go negative (or, worse, call in the lawyers). But if you take a step back, you can ask yourself (1) if the copying really matters one way or another and (2) if there's any way to use that copying to your advantage, rather than freaking out about it. That's the point we've been trying to make for years. In most cases, freaking out isn't going to make the situation any better (and it has a better than even chance of making it worse). But embracing it, and figuring out ways to use the copying to your own benefit can be tremendously rewarding.

But, of course, that doesn't mean we don't recognize that normal impulse reaction. It's entirely natural, even if it's irrational. So, we're not necessarily surprised when people overreact to such things -- even if we think it's not a particularly smart long-term strategy. But, hopefully, as more and more people show how allowing more widespread copying helped rather than harmed them, this won't seem so counterintuitive to so many people.

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Jeremy Nicholas, a British TV reporter, was told that he wasn't allowed to bring his laptop into a Cineworld movie theater because the chain had taken the advice of FACT (The Federation Against Copyright Theft) and banned computers from cinemas "to prevent piracy." The cinema had no facility for securely storing laptops -- which are worth thousands in and of themselves and often contain crucial and invaluable private and commercial information -- and suggested that he leave the laptop in his car in the unguarded parking lot.

Like many copyright loonies, FACT have shown again and again that they have no respect for property or privacy. These are the same people who advise theater owners to take away peoples' mobile phones during preview screenings (and won't disclose the security steps taken to protect them). There has never been a case of a movie recorded on a mobile phone. There has also never been a case of a pre-release movie leaking from a preview screening. And, of course, there's never been a case of a movie being pirated by someone with a laptop. I don't even know how you'd try -- hold the laptop on your lap, facing away from you?

Fundamentally, FACT is saying that people who have jobs that involve carrying computers (e.g. every single person I know) shouldn't go to the movies unless they're lucky enough to go home first.

Again: the message is, "Stay away from the cinema."

He confirmed that they had no cloakroom style ticket system in place to make sure you get your computer back after you've handed it in. So despite them treating customers with suspicion, as though were are all bootleggers, we have to trust them to get our equipment back.

I asked if it would be OK to take my mobile phone into the film as that does have the capacity to record movies. He asked if I was planning to use it for that purpose. I said no. He said it would be all right then.

Not the most rigorous interrogation and one that a determined bootlegger probably could have passed.

Mind you by now I'd shown him my BBC pass, my NUJ press card and (by accident) my Oyster card.

While I was standing being grilled in front of everyone, I saw a number of customers (or suspects as Cineworld probably calls them) being ushered to their seats. Many had bags, but they weren't computer bags, so they were OK. They were handbags and rucksacks, all of which could have contained iPhones, flips and all manner of small recording devices.

I was refused entry to a Cineworld cinema because I had a laptop with me. (via /.)

Barence writes "PC Pro has had time to play with the new BlackBerry Storm 2, and came away impressed. The new touch system garners the most praise, doing away with the mechanical click screen of the original Storm — the new screen gives a kind of localised haptic feedback which 'feels just like clicking a button.' The phone, announced today, also includes Wi-Fi, BlackBerry OS 5, and increased storage, so it's looking an enticing prospect. After the disappointment of the Palm Pre, could this be the smartphone to beat?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Barence writes "PC Pro has had time to play with the new BlackBerry Storm 2, and came away impressed. The new touch system garners the most praise, doing away with the mechanical click screen of the original Storm — the new screen gives a kind of localised haptic feedback which "feels just like clicking a button". The phone, announced today, also includes Wi-Fi, BlackBerry OS 5 and increased storage, so it's looking an enticing prospect. After the disappointment of the Palm Pre, could this be the smartphone to beat?"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

We'll be enjoying another helping of handmade & homebrew sounds this eve @ Brooklyn's 3rd Ward. Handmade Music ringmaster Peter Kirn of CDM gives a preview -

From Sarah and Lara Grant, we have a dress that makes music, with tube-like apparatus made of felt for connecting sound, modular fashion. From the raucous duo Great Tiger, we get a homebrewed arcade controller Ableton Live that mashes loops into dance music with a quick button push. Yep, it’s Handmade Music time again in New York tomorrow Thursday. If you’re anywhere in the area, come on down – and feel free to bring your own projects and/or expect some surprise technological appearances. If not, we’ve still got some MP3s, visuals, and how-to information to share.
If you do make it to Brooklyn, we can promise some behind-the-scenes demonstrations, noise, at least one live set, and free, ice-cold Colt 45s while they last.

A closer look at the lineup can be found over at Create Digital Music

Handmade Music
October 15
7:30 pm – 10:00 pm
195 Morgan Ave
3rd Ward, Brooklyn, NY

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We've been covering the ridiculous attempt by AT&T to sic the FCC on Google for deciding to block certain calls via Google Voice. AT&T is being misleading and incredibly disingenuous. While there are some issues with Google's decision to block certain calls, the issue there has nothing to do with net neutrality -- as AT&T aims to tweak Google for supporting net neutrality -- and everything to do with bad regulations -- which AT&T is just as against as Google is.

But the latest letter/PR play from AT&T sinks to ridiculous lows -- and it's a shame that no reporter I've seen so far calls AT&T on any of the crazy claims. While there's some fun in mocking the use of nuns (who are apparently also blocked), AT&T's "slippery slope" argument isn't just questionable, it's wrong:

Indeed, if the Commission cannot stop Google from blocking disfavored telephone calls as Google contends, then how could the Commission ever stop Google from also blocking disfavored websites from appearing in the results of its search engine; or prohibit Google from blocking access to applications that compete with its own email, text messaging, cloud computing and other services; or otherwise prevent Google from abusing the gatekeeper control it wields over the Internet?

But... uh... that's the thing. The FCC cannot stop Google from also blocking disfavored websites from appearing in its results. That's because Google has every right to determine what sites appear in its index and which don't -- and the courts have said exactly that in the past. Google's rankings and site index are Google's own opinion, and there's no legal right for Google to include anyone if it chooses not to. Google knows this. The FCC knows this. AT&T certainly knows this -- so why is it pretending that this is some big issue?

Then there's the claim about Google "blocking access to applications that compete with its own email, text messaging, cloud computing and other services." Except... Google physically cannot block such things, because Google is not the pipe. If I want to go to another email service provider, I just type that URL into my address bar, and Google isn't a party to that at all. The only one who could block such a thing is (oops) my ISP: AT&T. So why even make this argument? It's totally nonsensical.

Obviously, AT&T is having fun poking at Google over this particular issue, but, honestly it should at least limit its complaints to things that actually make sense.

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You'll recall (hopefully) Ardi, the Ardipithecus ramidus, an ancient human ancestor that's recently gotten a whole lot of media attention. Excellently pseudo-named blogger Zinjanthropus (actually a mild-mannered biological anthropology grad student) is doing a series of posts that take a close-up look at some of the biological quirks that make Ardi such a surprise.

The first post is on Ardi's hands...

The extant African apes are knuckle-walkers, they have stiff, inflexible hands and wrists that allow them to support their body weight in sort of a weird position. Because they also have to climb trees for food and protection, their hands are very long and powerful. Humans, on the other hand, have pretty mobile hands and wrists which allows us what we call a "power grip." We are very good graspers, and this has allowed us to become the dexterous tool-wielders that we are. Because of our close genetic similarity to chimps, and the close morphological similarity between chimps and gorillas, it has been argued that certain features of the Australopithecine wrist- and even the human wrist- were "hold overs" from the period of time when we, too were knuckle-walkers who required a stiff wrist and hand.
However, Ardi's hand more closely approximates the human hand than the knuckle-walker hand.

Sockatume writes "Cinema chain Cineworld now has a policy banning anyone from carrying a laptop into a theatre, even if it is not used. The management claims that this is an anti-piracy move on the advice of the Federation Against Copyright Theft, the much-mocked source of all kinds of dubious anti-piracy statements. When it was pointed out that the laptop had no camera, the management made a temporary exception. For customers, the message is clear: leave your laptop in the car. For pirates, the message is clear: there is more money to be made slinking around cinema car parks looking for laptop bags."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

One of the great things about remaking simple projects is the extra time they allow us to add enhancements and a personal touch. Instructable member computergeek swapped out the LED bargraph from my EMF detector to create a single-digit numerical display version. Good idea -

A while back I saw an EMF (Electromagnetic Field) Detector at makezine.com that used a led bargraph. I decided to modify it to use a 7-Segment LED Display! Here's my project. Sorry I don't have any pictures of it in use. Hopefully I can post some soon. Credit goes to Aaron ALAI for the original project . Also Conner Cunningham at Make: for doing a remake .

Thanks - I'll pass that on to Conner next time I see him ;) Here's hoping we'll soon see a 3D graphical representation of nearby fields … mapped to augmented reality? … k, maybe that's a bit of jump from a 7-segment - an LCD perhaps?

Related:

Making the Arduino EMF detector

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Cobwebs sez, "Since Halloween is galloping up, I thought you might like this tutorial for making a 'dead fairy' wunderkammer object out of a miniature plastic skeleton. Fun! Easy!"

Tutorial: Mummified Fairy (Thanks, Cobwebs!)

Just ran into a Norwegian librarian at Internet Librarian International in London wearing this killer tee-shirt, created in protest of the PATRIOT Act's provision to force librarians to reveal which books their patrons were checking out. The Latin translates as "We know what you read, and we're not saying."

We know what you read, and we're not saying

"Computational Complexity and Information Asymmetry in Financial Products," a new paper by Princeton computer scientists and economists Sanjeev Arora, Boaz Barak, Markus Brunnermeier, and Rong Ge suggests that complex financial derivatives are computationally intractable: that is, once you have mixed together a bunch of weird-ass securities and derivatives, you literally can't tell if the resulting security is being tampered with as it pays off (or doesn't). Freedom to Tinker's Andrew Appel likens it to cryptography: you can mix together a bunch of known quantities to get a new number that can't be turned back into the old numbers.

The paper shows the example of a high-volume seller who builds 1000 CDOs from 1000 assert-classes of home mortages. Suppose the seller knows that a few of those asset classes are "lemons" that won't pay off. The seller is supposed to randomly distribute the asset classes into the CDOs; this minimizes the risk for the buyer, because there's only a small chance that any one CDO has more than a few lemons. But the seller can "tamper" with the CDOs by putting most of the lemons in just a few of the CDOs. This has an enormous effect on the senior tranches of those tampered CDOs.

In principle, an alert buyer can detect tampering even if he doesn't know which asset classes are the lemons: he simply examines all 1000 CDOs and looks for a suspicious overrepresentation of some of the asset classes in some of the CDOs. What Arora et al. show is that is an NP-complete problem ("densest subgraph"). This problem is believed to be computationally intractable; thus, even the most alert buyer can't have enough computational power to do the analysis.

Arora et al. show it's even worse than that: even after the buyer has lost a lot of money (because enough mortgages defaulted to devalue his "senior tranche"), he can't prove that that tampering occurred: he can't prove that the distribution of lemons wasn't random. This makes it hard to get recourse in court; it also makes it hard to regulate CDOs.

Intractability of Financial Derivatives

Hoag sez, "VODO, a new project from one of the figures behind STEAL THIS FILM, is a an attempt to harness the power of filesharing networks for the benefit of filmmakers and other creators. Its unprecedented coalition of filesharing sites and services, including Mininova, Isohunt, The Pirate Bay, Legal Torrents and many others, has offered to promote new works by creators who want to share their works. VODO then encourages downloaders to donate directly to the filmmakers. VODO's just distributed its first film, US NOW by Ivo Gormely, which is now highly seeded on Mininova and available on many major filesharing sites under a CC-by-SA license."

Vodo (Thanks Hoag!)

BorgeStrand writes 'Patenting is an expensive process, even coming up with some sort of proof that your idea is unique (and thereby try to attract financing) may be prohibitive for the lone inventor. So what do you folks out there do when you come up with a good idea but don't have the means to patent it or market it to someone who will pay for the patenting process? And how much sense does it really make for the lone inventor to patent something? Would it make more sense to publish the whole idea, and make it (and my inventive brainpower) up for grabs? If my ideas are indeed valuable, what is the best way to gain anything from them without investing too much financially? What is your experience?'

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader writes "An electromagnetic "black hole" that sucks in surrounding light has been built for the first time. The device, which works at microwave frequencies, may soon be extended to trap visible light, leading to an entirely new way of harvesting solar energy to generate electricity. A theoretical design for a table-top black hole to trap light was proposed in a paper published earlier this year by Evgenii Narimanov and Alexander Kildishev of Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. Their idea was to mimic the properties of a cosmological black hole, whose intense gravity bends the surrounding space-time, causing any nearby matter or radiation to follow the warped space-time and spiral inwards."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

With the Nobel Prize in Economics being awarded to Elinor Ostrom (as well as Oliver Williamson) this year, plenty of people are noting that Ostrom's seminal work has to do with how the concept of "the tragedy of the commons" isn't really true in many cases, and how that "commons" can often self-regulate itself. And, Ostrom definitely recognizes how this applies to the "commons" that is the public domain. I didn't want to comment right away on this. While I've read Ostrom's work in the past, I wanted to revisit some of it, to refresh myself on it.

But what comes out in reading through her work is that she recognizes that government intervention -- such as with monopoly rights -- really doesn't make sense in many situations of "public goods." In a recent discussion on this site, people pointed to the concept of a "public good" as something that needs government intervention -- and I noted that more recent economic analysis showed that wasn't true at all. Ostrom's work is much of what kicked off that line of analysis (Coase deserves credit as well...). Her key finding was that in commons situations, the players can often work out perfectly reasonable solutions on their own, that don't involve regulatory efforts to put up fences or restrictions. The idea that a commons will automatically get overrun simply isn't true in practice. And that's exactly what we've seen in areas where there isn't intellectual property protections. The supposed fear of a "tragedy of the commons" never seems to show up. Instead, the markets adjust.

What struck me as really interesting, however, is that this is the second time in three years that the Nobel committee has awarded someone whose research highlights this point. In 2007, the award went to Eric Maskin, who has done work showing why patents can often be harmful (his focus was on software) -- again, suggesting that government intervention can be harmful in cases of "public goods." And, while it's less tied to the reasons why he got his Nobel or his core areas of research, last year's award winner, Paul Krugman, has recently come around to recognizing that "infinite goods" or public goods aren't a problem, but a potential opportunity as a market shifts.

It's nice to see the Nobel committee helping to get these ideas out there -- and highlighting the research that debunks the old wisdom that the answer to any public good is to create a gov't regulated monopoly system, rather than letting the market work out a solution on its own.

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It's tricky getting a keyboard working with an iPhone. Why is that? Does Apple go out of their way to make the two incompatible? It sure seems like it. With such an awesome touch interface you'd think they'd have the keyboard thing figured out. Luckily there are folks like maker Ben Kurtz who go out of their way to scratch an itch. Using an Arduino Diecimila, breakout board, female PS/2 connector, and sundry components Ben has built an interface to connect a full-sized keyboard to his jailbroken iPhone. It's a bit circuitous, but it gets the job done using easily resourced parts.

How To Connect a PS/2 Keyboard to the iPhone [via hackaday]

If you're interested in building a jailbreak-free keyboard interface for your iPhone, check out chapter 12 in iPhone Hacks.

In the Maker Shed:

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ruphus13 writes "In a recent talk at the Churchill Club, Michael Dell addressed several topics, including the fact that Windows 7 is poised to take advantage of the upgrade cycle. Dell has always been a strong MS OEM ally and it is now hoping to cash in again from the impending upgrades. From the post, 'Dell made plain several times that he sees the installed base of technology as very old, and sees a coming “refresh cycle,” for which he has high hopes. "The latest generation of chips from Intel is strong, particularly Nehalem," he said, adding, "and Windows 7 is on its way." (The operating system arrives Oct. 22nd, although Microsoft's large-volume licensees are already getting it.) He pointed out that many business are running Windows XP, which is eight years old. "I've been using Windows 7 for a long time now," he said, "and if you get the latest processor technology and Office 2010 with it, you will love your PC again. It's a dramatic improvement"'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Sam built a distinctly funky street stereo with a construction sign front panel and speakers rescued from the trash - nice aesthetic! The box makes use of a basic car stereo at the core - apparently even cheap ones come with USB and line-in nowadays. (finally!)

Related:

Turbo II, Junkyard Boogaloo - amazing boombox!

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This opinion piece takes stock of Sony's PlayStation Store, examining its flaws and the areas Sony needs to improve as their gaming systems come to rely upon it more and more. The problems and suggested solutions involve everything from UI elements to demo availability to pricing inconsistencies. "Some people may say that the Microsoft Points scheme is a little confusing, but it is consistent. If a game is 800MSP in the US, it's 800MSP everywhere else. What a MSP is worth is up to the store, but for the most part they're close. The PlayStation Store on the other hand can be all over the place. While most games in North America keep to the same price point — such as $9.99 or $14.99, converting that over to Europe is another thing entirely. For example, Flower came out earlier this year for $9.99USD. In Australia a $10USD game gets converted to $12.95AUD. Or does it? Bomberman Ultra just came out, and it's $15.95AUD. Heavy Weapon gets released for $12.95AUD, while Capcom’s previous efforts, like Commando 3, convert to $15.95. The same thing also happens for more expensive titles. Both Battlefield 1943 and Fat Princess were released for $14.99 in the US, but in Australia they're priced at $19.95AUD and $23.95 respectively."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Epson is claiming its new Ultimicron series of compact, high-temperature polysilicon (HTPS) panels will allow electronic viewfinders to offer the 'resolution and fidelity' required to fully replace optical viewfinders on digital SLRs. The new panel, which has just gone into mass production, offers a similar 1.44MP resolution (800x600xRGB) to the class-leading viewfinders in Panasonic's DMC-G1/GH1, but uses a color filter to prevent color breakup when panning or shooting fast-moving objects. The poor performance of most existing EVF technology when compared to reflex viewfinders is a major barrier to the adoption of mirrorless interchangeable lens system cameras, and Epson obviously has high hopes for a market segment that's expected to grow significantly during 2010.

The Citizen Media Law Project has yet another story of bogus lawsuits being used to silence something someone doesn't want written about them. In this case, it involved Jim Dolan, known (but not particularly liked) to New Yorkers as the owner of Cablevision, the Knicks and Madison Square Garden. More recently, Cablevision bought the newspaper Newsday -- so you might think that Dolan would be a little more aware of why it's bad to sue a news publication claiming defamation over a clearly speculative piece. And, yet, sue he did. Dolan sued the blog Cityfile for posting a piece about rumors that Dolan was considering getting rid of the famous "Christmas Spectacular" involving the Rockettes at Radio City Music Hall in New York. As Arthur Bright points out, the original post doesn't seem all that different than speculative articles published all the time in pretty much every media outlet.

Unfortunately, facing a protracted legal fight, Cityfile agreed to settle and "retract" the story. Bright notes that this is silly, and any decent lawyer should have been able to get the lawsuit tossed on First Amendment grounds. The problem is the time and resources needed to fight such a thing.

Bright then points out how this highlights the need for stronger anti-SLAPP laws in New York. Anti-SLAPP laws let people fight back against such bogus lawsuits, whose purpose is only to silence speech (SLAPP stands for Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation). The problem, however, is that right now anti-SLAPP laws are at the state level, and only a few states have really strong ones. New York is not one of them. While Bright says this is evidence of why NY should strengthen its anti-SLAPP laws, a better solution might be a strong federal anti-SLAPP law, that shows a strong support for freedom of speech, and helps prevent bogus lawsuits whose only purpose is to allow those with more money to silence speech they dislike.

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Matt Sarnoff wrote in to let us know that his ChipDB project just went live:

Instead of digging through hundred-page PDF datasheets to find the pinout of a microcontroller or logic chip, you can use a simple URL scheme (example: http://msarnoff.org/chipdb/atmega168) to get the data right away.

Its collection is currently small, but includes the most common chips; Atmel microcontrollers, 4000 series, 7400 series, LMxxx series, and more. There's a bookmarklet for one-click lookups and a keyword search that lets you find a part even if you don't know its number.

Users can contribute their own entries to the database. Since the site is in its infancy, I currently moderate all submissions, but I hope to change this in the future if demand is great enough.

ChipDB - integrated circuit quick reference

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TechReviewAl writes "Researchers in Germany have developed a surgical tool that uses chemical analysis to identify cancerous tissue as a surgeon cuts. The instrument uses a modified mass spectrometer — a device that uses ionized molecules to perform very accurate chemical analysis — to pinpoint tumors so that surgeons can make sure they remove everything. Mass spectrometry has been used to study biopsied biological samples before, but never used in-situ. The key was to harness ionized gas already produced by the electro-scalpel."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

TechReviewAl writes "Researchers in Germany have developed a surgical tool that uses chemical analysis to identify cancerous tissue as a surgeon cuts. The instrument uses a modified mass spectrometer--a device that uses ionized molecules to perform very accurate chemical analysis--to pinpoint tumors so that surgeons can make sure they remove everything. Mass spectrometry has been used to study biopsied biological samples before, but never used in-situ. The key was to harness ionized gas already produced by the electro-scalpel."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Earlier this year, a study claiming that students who used Facebook had lower grades got a lot of attention, with the typical fear mongering and moral panics coming out of the woodwork. But, of course, correlation does not mean causation, and Facebook is just a tool. For schools that use it in a smart way, perhaps it could do good. Reader Ben Ketteridge points us to the news of how Gloucestershire College has embraced Facebook to help students do better. It's kept the staff and faculty better in touch with students and reduced drop out rates, so far. It's also helped students work together in virtual study groups, something that other colleges have complained was a form of cheating. It's nice to see at least some higher education institutions looking at ways to use tools to improve the overall experience, rather than just complaining about such online services.

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babboo65 writes "Dungeons and Dragons Online is enjoying a second life in terms of player count and buzz, all thanks to its new business strategy: giving the game away. Turbine is making their MMO as accessible as possible, and that includes making players who don't pay anything as happy as possible. Subscriptions are up 40 percent. Ars explores how free can be very profitable."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

When my mom came to visit me from Tokyo in August, she brought the summer 2009 edition of a wonderful furniture catalog called Iimono Hakken Jutsu, which roughly translates as The magic of discovering great things. The cover promises 3-day delivery and 24-hours of easy living. From cheap fake bricks to decorate a bland white wall to shoes for pregnant moms, the catalog really does seem to solve every household dilemma in a SkyMall-meets-IKEA-meets-Japanese research lab type of way. Although I live in the US and will probably never own any of these things, I thought I'd show you some of my faves — in particular, the ones that are made to save space. Most Japanese, especially in the cities, live in smaller spaces, which explains why things like refrigerators and vacuum cleaners are on average much tinier there than here. Here are some practical, innovative solutions offered in the Iimono catalog. This bulky ironing board alternative consists of a small rectangular bag made just big enough to fit a standard-sized iron; take out the iron, unfold the bag, and you have a portable ironing board surface that can be laid on top of any flat surface. For less than $15. This revolving bookshelf only takes up 45 square cm of floor space but fits up to 250 comic books or 150 VHS tapes. Amazing right? It comes in five different colors and two height options — 120.5 cm or 166.5 cm — depending on how many books you have or how low your ceiling are. Each costs less than $100. Many Japanese sleep in the same room that they eat and lounge in — instead of owning beds, they have mattresses (called futons, though not the same as the bulky mess you get in America) and blankets that are hidden in a closet during the day and pulled out at bedtime. But even folded up mattresses can take up a lot of closet space that could and should be used for other things. Using these blanket cases reduces the amount of storage space consumed to 1/3. And finally, the portable toilet. This is actually supposed to be for emergency use only, but I love that it folds up into a briefcase (see bottom left illo). It costs about $64. Also, it's called the Rescue Toilet.

We've noticed a troubling trend in how legitimate online music services are being pressured into deals with the major record labels. The labels begin the negotiations on licenses... and then sue the company. That, of course, makes life difficult for the startup, which is then pressured to offer even better (read: ridiculously onerous) terms to the labels. We've seen it happen over and over again, and saw it happening when EMI sued Grooveshark this past summer. And, of course, a few months later, the lawsuit is dropped and a licensing deal has been reached, though you can bet the terms are not quite what Grooveshark originally intended. That's what happens when part of the "negotiation" involves a lawsuit.

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Andrew sez, "This is unbelievable from an amateur photographer. The light, the costumers, the overall keyhole shape, it's spectacular. It looks like a lost Leibovitz outtake and it was shot by an amateur with a point & shoot."

The shot depicts three Sleeping Beauty cosplayers dressed as "Merryweather, Princess Aurora and Flora from Disney's Sleeping Beauty at the Georgia Aquarium during Dragon*Con Night 2009."

Dragon*Con 2009 (Thanks, Andrew!)

(Image: Positive Space)

Comics artist Frank Brunner has done a series of Frazetta-esque Alice in Wonderland nudes that are sexy, retro, and lovely.

Nudes (via MeFi)

Ars Technica's Nate Anderson does a nice job evaluating the claims coming from Internet research firm Nemertes Research, who made headlines in 2007 by predicting a huge spike in traffic by 2010 (the "exaflood") that would cause internet "brownouts" (Nemertes' answer was to limit what people were allowed to do on the internet by giving ISPs the power to cut off access to services that they didn't like).

Now, Nemertes has a new claim: that net neutrality -- the idea that ISPs should manage their networks to deliver the bytes you requested as quickly as possible, rather than slowing down some bytes if they're sent by companies that refuse to pay bribes for "premium" access to you -- will result in a netpocalypse where we have to pay for every byte we receive.

Fortunately, actual Internet traffic growth rates are between 50-60 percent year over year, not 100 percent, according to the authoritative MINTS project at the University of Minnesota. And in countries like Canada (where carriers revealed much of their data to regulators as part of a net neutrality hearing), growth rates have dropped from 53 percent (2005-2006) to 44 percent (2006-2007) to 32 percent (2007-2008).

The Internet's core has plenty of bandwidth, so traffic growth really poses the biggest problem for access lines. Fortunately, big gains in capacity in the last mile aren't "excruciatingly expensive." While Johnson's single example is the most expensive last-mile buildout in the US (Verizon's transition from copper lines to fiber optics), cable and DSL operators can upgrade their lines for bargain basement prices by adopting DOCSIS 3.0 (cable) or by running fiber deeper into the network (as with AT&T's U-verse, which already offers 18Mbps connections over copper wire compared to 6Mbps on the rest of its network).

Even Verizon, which is dropping $18 billion on the job, is doing so in the very sort of environment that Johnson says will sink the 'Net--one where neutrality is assumed and differential protocol pricing is not utilized.

The Internet is about to die. Literally die!

Finland's Ministry of Transport and Communications has declared that access to 1MB broadband is a legal right. This is significant as it recognizes that much of what we do in today's world requires the net, from renewal of government documents like driving licenses to education to access to health services to engagement in the civic process by filing comments and forms with our local and national governments.

It's also significant because the EU is trying to pass legislation on behalf of the record industry that would require European ISPs to cut off your Internet access if you were accused -- without proof or a court case -- of infringing copyright. Recognizing that broadband is a right makes this much harder to square with norms of justice and human rights.

According to the report, every person in Finland (a little over 5 million people, according to a 2009 estimate) will have the right of access to a 1Mb broadband connection starting in July. And they may ultimately gain the right to a 100Mb broadband connection.

Just more than a year ago, Finland said it would make a 100Mb broadband connection a legal right by the end of 2015. Wednesday's announcement is considered an intermediate step.

France, one of a few countries that has made Internet access a human right, did so earlier this year. France's Constitutional Council ruled that Internet access is a basic human right. That said, it stopped short of making "broadband access" a legal right. Finland says that it's the first country to make broadband access a legal right.

Finland makes 1Mb broadband access a legal right (via /.)

JWZ was nearly hit by a crazy driver while on his bike in San Francisco; the driver then went on to hit his friend, and then took off. JWZ caught up with him and said, "Hey! You just hit that guy!" and the driver said, "Really? That's just terrible," and drove away. But there were witnesses, a paramedic's report, and a photo of the driver's license plate.

I was hit by a drunk driver on my bike when I was 21, and still have knee problems because of it. It was a hit-and-run, and the police caught him later with parts of my bike stuck to his grille. He was a repeat offender, too. But because of Ontario's screwy no-fault insurance and crappy justice system, I wasn't informed of the court date, didn't get to object to him entering a plea and merely losing his license for a few months and paying a $1000 fine. I got a new bike, a change of clothes, and three physio sessions out of it.

I can't think of anything more cowardly and vile than hit-and-run driving. I hope this guy loses his car, his license, and the respect and fellowship of his community.

Monday around 6pm, [info]netik and I were biking West on Harrison on the right side when a car passed me on the left, within a few inches. I had enough time to think, "Hey, that was close", look forward, and yell "Look out!" before the car's mirror hit [info]netik's handle bar from behind and sent him tumbling. The guy kept driving. I chased after the car, pulled up to his window and said, "Hey! You just hit that guy!" He look at me and said, in a calm deadpan, "Really? That's just terrible." And then he drove off.

[info]netik has a giant bruise, but isn't hurt badly, and his bike is ok. Knowing him, had this guy stopped and been even slightly apologetic, there probably wouldn't even have been a police report. But instead, the driver chose to turn it into a felony hit and run, with three witnesses, a paramedic report, and a photo of his license plate.

Enjoy your upcoming lack of a driver's license, loss of insurance, $1,000 to $10,000 fine, and possible jail time, scumbag.

You have a nice day too, Sir.

bennyboy64 writes "iTnews reports the patent battle between Australia's CSIRO and 14 of the world's largest technology companies has gained the research organization $200 million from out of court settlements. CSIRO executive director of commercial, Nigel Poole, said the CSIRO were wanting to license their technology further, stating that he "urged" companies using it to come forward and seek a license.'We believe that there are many more companies that are using CSIRO's technology and it's our desire to license the technology further,' Poole said.'We would urge companies that are currently selling devices that have 802.11 a,g or n to contact CSIRO and to seek a license because we believe they are using our technology.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Years ago, I got really into Warhammer 40,000, the tabletop miniature sci-fi wargame. I quickly found myself more into painting and converting the miniatures and building the terrain than in playing the game itself. I even ran a website for modeling and conversion for a few years. I'm starting to feel the itch again and so have been checking out lots of modeling and terrain sites and videos. YouTube didn't exist when I was in the hobby the first time, so it's great to see all of the modeling and terrain-building how-tos now. One guy's site and videos I'm really liking is Steve Delaney's. He's this very laid back Canadian who says "Eh?" a lot and sort of mumbles his way through his numerous funky, but informative, how-to videos. He's really good at buildings and terrain modeling and has tons of great tips and techniques. Definitely worth bookmarking if you're into tabletop gaming.

RPG War Game Terrain, Obstacles and Scenery

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AP: "Captain Lou Albano dies at 76; wrestler appeared in Cyndi Lauper videos."

He may be best known for his roles in those early MTV classics, but I betcha don't know this, gamers: he also played "Mario" in "The Super Mario Bros. Super Show (1989-1991)," a live-action/animated kids' show based on the famous arcade game. Here's a trailer video, which shows Mr. Albano in that role -- and here's the credits, with Albano urging you to "Do the Mario!"

Image: detail of this photo, from LIFE. Related: one with Cyndi Lauper, and another here, 1984 (no photographer credit).

Update: Another YouTube gem. @EvilPRGuy reminds us of this fantastically bad anti-drug PSA Albano did in the '80s (in character as Mario), which warned that if you do drugs, "you'll go to hell before you die."

Small and simple, the iCOP eBox is a fanless x86 computer with solid state storage.

I began my second SPARK project with plans to control my iRobot Create with an iCOP computer and Windows Embedded CE 6.0R2. There were many project design lessons reinforced by my first SPARK project, and I applied those to lessons my second SPARK project. Even though I was working with powerful tools, Windows Embedded CE and the SPARK kits are complex systems. It is important to start with very simple expectations, get the basic components to function, and then design in complex features. With this focus on simplicity, I set about writing Windows Embedded code for the Create. After tracking down the necessary documentation for the Create's programming interface, I started with a simple "Hello World" program, and documented the process here. My next step involved sending and receiving data over the iCOP computer's serial port. Very quickly, I found myself editing registry code to enable the serial port for application use. Why did I need to do that and what were the results? The answers to those questions require a discussion of several intermediate steps which bring clarity to the structure and design of a Windows Embedded CE application.

Read more about it in the full post here.

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We've complained in the past about how rare it is for reporters at newspapers to actually engage in comments on their articles. Instead, they seem to view the comments with disdain, pointing out how idiotic many comments are. Well, of course that's what happens when the folks at the actual newspaper ignore them. So, while it's nice to see a newspaper like the Cleveland Plain Dealer (whose writers have been advocating for changing copyright law to protect newspaper business models) finally realize that its reporters need to engage in comments in order to foster more of a useful community in those comments, it's really quite stunning that it's taken this long for newspapers to figure it out -- and that such a "revelation" requires a special announcement from the newspaper itself.

We're joining the online conversation. For too long, we at The Plain Dealer posted stories on cleveland.com and then turned away to focus on the next day's news. Now, we're encouraging our reporters and editors to pay attention to what you're saying, to answer your questions and respond to your complaints.

A newspapers' true asset is the community it serves. Too many in the newspaper business have been neglecting that community. It's great that this particular newspaper seems to have finally figured it out, though it's amazing that it took this long and is such a big change in focus that it requires an announcement.

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UT Austin student/librarian/artist Keef calls this project "Professor Teeth." It incorporates a dental mannequin with the jaws fixed up to chatter like that thing from Hellraiser that chatters? I think it's called "The Chatterer?" Also it tells fortunes and stuff. There's video here. [Thanks, Keef!]

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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While the US is still struggling to figure out how to define broadband and where it's even available, Finland has decided that 1Mb broadband access should now be considered a legal right, with plans to boost that to 100Mb by the end of 2015. There do appear to be some exceptions for remote households, but if I were living in Finland right now, instead of the heart of Silicon Valley, my "legal rights" would be denied. While I'm not sure it makes sense to define broadband as a legal right, it's yet another reminder of how far behind the US appears to be on broadband deployments.

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fsouto writes "Researchers have discovered a magnetic equivalent to electricity. From the article, 'The phenomenon, dubbed "magnetricity," could be used in magnetic storage or in computing. Magnetic monopoles were first predicted to exist over a century ago, as a perfect analogue to electric charges. Although there are protons and electrons with net positive and negative electric charges, there were no particles in existence which carry magnetic charges. Rather, every magnet has a "north" and "south" pole.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Kristin Boehm has posted a great detailed tutorial on how to make a lightbox out of K'Nex pieces for product photography. She was digging for the perfect materials and stumbled across a box of K'Nex from her childhood, and the rest is history.

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Swedish designers get commuters off the escalator by making the stairs more fun. It's awesome. And, yet, part of me wonders how creepy this would be if you were descending into the subway alone late at night. Plink...plink....plink...

The Title: As an Era Ends, Celebrating the Polaroid

The First Paragraph: On Oct. 9, the last lot of Polaroid film will pass its "use by" date, and the era of instant Polaroid photography will officially be over, or at least for now.

The Unexpected Breaking News That Sort of Ruins An Otherwise Heartfelt Goodbye: Update | 12:51 p.m. After this post was written, Polaroid announced that they will resume production of instant cameras by the middle of 2010.

We've been discussing why online advertising is often a bad idea for advertisers (not so much for many publishers, but that's a different issue), as ad blindness rules the day. Now there's even more evidence, as the already tiny clickthrough rate on online ads is dropping, rapidly. Basically, it sounds like more and more people are simply ignoring online ads, which is to be expected, since they rarely (if ever?) add much of value. This is the advertisers' fault. There are lots of ways that advertisers could actually add value for consumers/readers/users online -- but they're all so scared to death of actually taking that step. Instead, many are so focused on obsolete metrics like the CPM, that they're unable or unwilling to really branch out and try marketing and advertising programs that actually are effective. Simply tossing up more ad banners isn't doing the trick. Really engaging with users would help, but most brands still haven't figured out quite how to do that, even if it isn't particularly complex.

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Looking to take a break from tinkering on your latest project this weekend? Here are some fine maker events to check out, from The Maker Events Calender. Wish your event was on the list? Add it to the calender!

Coming up this week:

Science Days
Rust, Germany
Thursday, Oct 15, 2009 - Saturday, Oct 17, 2009

HANDMADE MUSIC NIGHT: Felted musical suits and arcade button music!
Brooklyn, NY
Thursday, Oct 15, 2009, 7:30pm +

California Hot Rod Reunion
McFarland, CA
Friday, Oct 16, 2009 - Sunday, Oct 18, 2009

Milton Keynes Science Festival
Central Milton Keynes, United Kingdom
Saturday, Oct 17, 2009 - Sunday, Oct 25, 2009

Bay Area Hamcram
Fremont, CA
Saturday, Oct 17, 2009, 8am - 5pm

Joule Thievery
Brooklyn, NY
Saturday, Oct 17, 2009, 4pm - 6pm

Arduino/Soldering 101 - Make your own Arduino and Learn to Program it!
Brooklyn, NY
Sunday, Oct 18, 2009, 1pm - 4pm

William Gurstelle Presents "Absinthe and Flamethrowers" (PDF, see page 5)
Owatonna, MN
Monday, Oct 19, 2009, 7pm - 8:30pm

Introductory Arduino Class
Brooklyn, NY
Monday, Nov 19, 2009, 7:30pm - 9:30pm

Start planning for:

Manchester Science Festival 2009
Manchester, United Kingdom
Sat, October 24, 2009 - Sunday, Nov 01, 2009

Video Editing in iMovie '09
Pittsburgh, PA
Saturday, Oct 24, 2009, 2pm - 4:30pm

Make:RDU inaugural meeting
Durham, NC
Saturday, Oct 24, 2009, 2pm +

CPUs 0b1100101: Intro to computer processors
Brooklyn, NY
Sunday, Oct 25, 2009, 1pm - 3pm

High Fashion Low Voltage (part 1) Arduino Lilypad
Saint Paul, MN
Saturday, Oct 31, 2009, 9pm - 12pm

Mobile Art && Code
Pittsburgh, PA
Friday, Nov 6 to Sunday, Nov 8, 2009, all weekend

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Connie Choe is a health and culture writer by day and a professional kimchimonger by night.

The Fender Music Foundation is seeking a rockstar-worthy t-shirt design. The winning artist gets $300 cash money and a Squier by Fender Deluxe Hot Rails Strat Electric Guitar (whew!) with a decal of their winning design on it. Submissions are due by October 30^th. Last I checked they had fewer than 15 entries, so even if your art skills are a little rusty, you're still roughly eleventybillion times more likely to win this than the lottery.

Goodjoe Design for a Greater Good Presents The Fender Music Foundation

Image courtesy of tskdesign via Flickr / CC 2.0

When a rep for Yoko Ono pinged me last week about a new crowdsourced remix project the legendary artist was launching, my first question was, "Will the resulting fan-remixes be made available under a Creative Commons license? And if not, would you consider talking to the CC folks to learn more about why that's a good idea?"

Well, I am very excited to share that after some good conversations between Ms. Ono's camp and the Creative Commons folks (specifically Creative Director Eric Steuer), the answer is YES.

This is so awesome! Brava to Ms. Ono for introducing her work into the realm of "open culture," this is a brave and significant step. It makes me very happy to see this kind of dialogue and risk-taking happen with artists whose legacies and cultural influence are as broad as hers. I also think the remix project in question sounds like a lot of fun, and I encourage you to go check it out -- and participate! Here's the announcement from her team:

Yoko Ono Plastic Ono Band - The Sun Is Down (remix) competition.

We're very pleased to announce that thanks to the helpful advice of Xeni Jardin at BoingBoing and Eric Steuer at Creative Commons, the audio elements for Yoko Ono Plastic Ono Band - The Sun Is Down (remix) are now being released under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 License. We firmly believe that releasing the elements under a CC license embodies the true spirit of the competition.

In light of this, we have extended the competition deadline to 12 December 2009 to allow time for those who may now wish to contribute under the revised terms. In addition, artists interested in permissions beyond the scope of the CC license can email us at remix@yopob.com.

Long live the remix. Here's a post about this cool news on the Creative Commons blog.

(Download MP4 video or Watch on YouTube, or view with subtitles on Dotsub).

Institute for the Future teamed up with Sun Microsystems and Boing Boing Video to co-host the Digital Open, an online tech expo for teens 17 and under around the world.

In today's episode, you'll meet the "Funky Shiitake Mushrooms," a group of young people from a Fremont, CA high school who build robotic blimps. The one you see in this video also doubles as a fashionable hat, as you can see from the photo inset at left (that's me with the headgear).

The blimp in this episode is named "Skittles the Second," after the popular, cartoon-colored candy. They'd made an earlier version of "Skittles," but that one floated away. In fact, it floated all the way to a farm near Yosemite. The farmer found an ID tag on the floataway airship, and phoned a teacher at the high school to advise. The teen makers were eager to road trip out there and pick it up, but only one of them was old enough to drive.

Their energy and inventiveness was inspiring. I hope you enjoy the video as much as we enjoyed making it.

Read more about the youth competition in IFTF's press release announcing Digital Open winners. And you can visit team Funky Shiitake Mushrooms online, here.

The thing that you sort of need to admire about the copyright maximalist lobby is that they attack the problem from so many different directions on such a constant basis. It's almost impossible to keep up -- though, you do begin to notice some patterns. A particularly popular move is to alternate between the moral argument against copyright infringement (stealing! bad!) and the idea that file sharing is going to destroy your computer (we're just looking out for your safety!). It looks like the industry is back on that latter kick, as two recent stories indicate.

First, the BSA has its widely debunked "piracy" numbers -- but it's now getting news for focusing instead on how you're going to get malware if you file share. Since it can't actually back up its bogus numbers, instead it's hoping that most people don't know that correlation doesn't mean a causal relationship -- but at least we know that most of our readers know better. The report notes that there's a correlation between higher piracy rates and higher malware infections, but seems to totally ignore exceptions to that rule (the US) or delve into other variables that may explain either the piracy rate (already questionable) or the malware rate (education levels? poverty? shared computers? etc.). Even more amusing, they claim (with no actual evidence) that those who get malware have to spend more to repair their computers than it would have cost to get the legitimate software in the first place. I have no doubt that there are risks for those who file share, but this report does nothing to show the actual risks and is yet another in a long line of weak propaganda from the BSA, that despite being called on it for years, never seems to do anything to back up its reports with facts.

Then, we have the story of the MPAA apparently sending a bunch of anti-piracy comic books to New Zealand, home of one of many different fights on how to change copyright law. The comic book, like the BSA report, involves plenty of ridiculous and unsubstantiated claims about how file sharing will unleash nasty malware and viruses all over your computers -- but drawn in nice comic book form. Can we send those kids who got the MPAA comic book a copy of the Tales from The Public Domain comic books as well? There are free digital downloads for anyone who wants to hand them out in exchange for the bogus MPAA ones....

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